Domains being listed in someone elses Afternic account

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baldidiot

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This happened to me today and it's wound me right up. Someone has added one of our domains to afternic with a BIN price so that it's showing on godaddy.

The domain is for one of our active sites and definitely not for sale, nor is it in our afternic account.

What's annoyed me is that they've said the only way to remove it is to add the domain to our afternic account, verify ownership and then delete it. So rather than getting the person who has it in their afternic account to verify that they own it, we have to prove that they don't own it.

Also once I've deleted the domain, I'm pretty sure there's nothing to stop someone else adding it to afternic. Meaning that if that happened, I'd have to go back and add it again and re-verify. Or I have to leave a domain listed in afternic that I don't want to sell.

Surely the sensible option here is to make everyone verify their domains as they add them and not end up in a position where people could be scammed into losing their domains - thankfully it's not registered with godaddy, but I am concerned that if it was and someone did the BIN then afternic/godaddy would just do the fast transfer and whip the domain out of the account without permission.

I'm half tempted to just go and do the BIN myself to see what happens...
 
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Just a little warning chaps.

Not only are there parasites listing other people's domains on the Afternic platform, registrars are partnering with Afternic and introducing the 'Afternic Fast Transfer' option on their platforms. It works when the registrar receives a request from Afternic asking them to 'enable' fast transfer on a specifically targeted domain name. So a parasite lists your name and Afternic requests the registrar to enable the fast transfer option. If this option is active and someone purchases your domain on the Afternic platform, your domain is immediately transferred out of your account without you having to lift a finger. I have had the Afternic request 3 times on 3 different valuable domains. My domains are currently listed on their platform even thought they have been warned by me. Each time Afternic makes the request, I get an email from my registrar telling me I need to either Opt in or Op out. I am going to transfer every domain out of my current registrar to one that is not partnering with Afternic when I receive future requests. Be warned!
 
It's a little 'worse' than Jack makes out, as the 'fast transfer' flag remains set at numerous registrars, even after a domain changes registrant.

This can mean you don't get the Afternic listing request at all ( all registrars will pass those on, but not all partake in the 'fast funnel to GD' system ).

The upshot of FT is that should a GD platform decide its sold, the domain is gone, with limited ( and costly ) routes to get back - old registrant listings, listings of names since dropped, your previous listings, scammer listings etc all mean it can be whipped away instantly, often without you knowing and without you getting paid.

It's a several years long recurring scam where scum will list names they scrape from other platforms, lists they d/load from sales reporting sites and even now we're starting to see them target names on known 'sale platform' nameservers.

GoDaddy/AfterNIC are well aware they are complicit in domain thefts and not remotely interested in resolving an issue that clearly makes them money.
 
Yes this is one of the things I'm worried about. The opt in message was actually how I discovered that it had been added to afternic.

There also doesn't seem to be an easy way to make sure that a domain is opted out of fast transfer with the registrar once it's opted in, or even a way to tell if a domain has been opted in. And like you say, this causes problems if you purchase a domain that has previously been opted in and you might not even realise it.

Is there a list of registrars who do not support fast transfer?

The ridiculous thing is that it sounds like the best way to protect your domains is to add your whole portfolio to afternic, and then set the listings to hidden. But who wants to do that?
 
baldidiot said:
There also doesn't seem to be an easy way to make sure that a domain is opted out of fast transfer with the registrar once it's opted in,
Click to expand...
Are you sure that this is the case? I am, of course, open to the fact that I might be wrong, but this is my assessment of the structure of this but not the actual implementation of the transfers themselves:

It seems as though, on the registrar I just checked on, that you have to accept the terms of afternic fast transfer for your account on said registrar in order to enable it on your domains therein.

To have afternic fast transfer enabled for your account without your knowledge is equivalent to having the terms and conditions accepted by someone else without your knowledge by someone else.

The acceptance of the terms are not on an individual domain basis from what I can tell.
 
In my experience I've had to opt-in to fast transfer at godaddy/afternic for my non .uk names - but you do indeed lose control after that point if you've got a BIN price, someone checks out and the domain is enabled with fast transfer. A few years ago, a price update on a domain was reverted by someone at GD and the domain sold and it was helluva an adventure to bust the sale and get the domain returned.
 
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