(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — A New Jersey man, who was the first to be criminally arrested for domain name theft in the US, has been indicted on charges he stole a domain name, which he then sold on eBay for $111,000.
According to court reports, Criminal Justice Director Deborah L. Gramiccioni, the Division of Criminal Justice Major Crimes/Computer Analysis & Technology Unit, obtained a seven-count state grand jury indictment that charges 25-year-old Daniel Goncalves, of Union Township with theft by unlawful taking, theft by deception, computer theft, and identity theft, all in the second degree, and three counts of fourth-degree falsifying records.
“In the big money marketplace of the Internet, a popular domain name is like prime commercial real estate,” said Attorney General Milgram. “The indictment charges that this defendant hacked into an online account of P2P.com, LLC, stole their domain name, and sold it to an unsuspecting customer on eBay for approximately $111,000.”
Goncalves was arrested in July by the New Jersey State Police Cyber Crimes Unit after an investigation into the theft of the P2P.com domain name. In searching his premises, state troopers seized a large volume of business and computer records relevant to the domain name theft.
P2P.com, LLC, was formed expressly for the purchase and management of one domain name, P2P.com. Because of its short length and topical relation to the exploding Peer to Peer file sharing phenomenon, the domain name P2P.com was particularly valuable. The New Jersey State Police Cyber Crimes Unit initiated an investigation in October 2008 when representatives of P2P.com, LLC contacted them and asserted that their domain name had been stolen from their GoDaddy account in May 2006.
P2P.com, LLC began investigating the matter privately in May 2007, when an individual in the domaining community observed irregularities in the P2P.com site content and advised the company. A check of the P2P.com, LLC corporate GoDaddy domain account revealed that the domain name had been transferred without their knowledge or consent almost a year earlier.
It is charged that in May 2006, Goncalves illegally accessed P2P.com’s GoDaddy account, and initiated a transfer of the domain name to his personal GoDaddy account. Records obtained from GoDaddy verified that the same IP address used to log into the P2P.com, LLC account and initiate the transfer was used to log into Goncalves’ own GoDaddy account and receive the transferred domain, completing the theft. He then allegedly sold it to former basketball player Mark Madsen, who was unaware that the Internet address was stolen.
