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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
    Location
    In a condo
    Posts
    3

    Identifying domain name owner

    I work for a company that recently discovered an employee was using company sales leads for personal purposes. Among this employee's e-mail messages (employee did not empty deleted items!) was reference to a web-site claimed by the employee. Not sure if this was intended as direct possession or simple association. The point is that the domain name given very strongly implied that the site was in direct competition with us.

    I printed the site indicated by URL, and printed the Network Solutions WhoIs record - a privatized record pointing directly back to Network Solutions. Fortunately I did both before the employee was confronted with the information. The site was supposed to start operating the day I discovered the situation. Amazingly enough the site was missing the next day (standard The page cannot be displayed page)!

    Is there anything we can do for more in-depth investigation of this? Preferably without alerting these people that we are investigating.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Feb 2002
    Location
    The OC
    Posts
    2,094
    Interesting question. I believe that every registrar that operates privatized whois services have their own critera for releasing the true owner of the domain. Some registrars probably require some sort of court subpoena or contact from police or government agencies before they will release the information. You should check directly with Network Solutions to see their requirements - they might only require a letter from your lawyer or corporate counsel that there is an investigation into this domain name.

    Another less sure way (but quieter), would be if the employee perhaps made a mistake and registered the domain under his/her real name briefly before hiding the whois information with Network Solutions privitization service. Some services like www.whois.sc will let you see the history of whois changes for a fee. If you run the domain name through whois.sc, it will state under Whois History: # records stored. Then if you get their "Silver Membership" which is $15 a month, you can look-up the whois history. Obviously, if there is only 1 record then it will only show the current Network Solutions whois record.

    Anyway... just some ideas for you to consider. Good Luck!
    You may delay, but time will not. --- Benjamin Franklin

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
    Location
    In a condo
    Posts
    3
    Thank you! Excellent advice. I am going to print this out and have both the company President and the Corporate Attorney review your suggestions to see if any of this is worth pursuing as you suggest. Regardless, I am going to check the history through the web-site you suggested.

    Vielen Dank, Muchas Gracias, Merci Boucoup, and other poorly spelled thanks.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Aug 2004
    Location
    Australia
    Posts
    896
    You could sent an email to the whois email address (use an address he cant trace to you)

    Put an offer on the domain just say its in your list of possibilities alot of people configure their email clients to Display their full name on outgoing emails so you may get his name in the email header.

    If that dosent work try asking them who they are say that since your conducting bussiness its appropriate that you know who your dealing with.

    Altho it would have been better to do this befor confrontation.
    I could tell you a joke about UDP. But I'm not sure you would get it!

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Nov 2002
    Posts
    4,667
    The scary part about WHOIS protection (from a user''s point of view) is that even the allegation of wrong doing will send NetSol scurrying to repopulate the WHOIS will your real data. This is true of all registrars, they will not get involved, and any allegation will unhide your private data.

    http://www.networksolutions.com/en_U....jhtml#prv_reg
    Netsol can "terminate your subscription to our Private Registration Service: (i) if any third party claims that the domain name violates or infringes a third party's trademark, trade name or other legal rights, whether or not such claim is valid;"

  6. #6
    If the domain's registered with netsol, despite the privacy service
    it'll still show the registrant's name. Netsol's privacy service only
    hides the street address, email, and phone of the registrant and
    its contacts.

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