I’ve owned many domain names over the course of 19 or so years. Some of them I’ve developed, some of them I have not. Some of them get auto-registered when I no longer want or need them and some get auctioned or sold off to other buyers because I neglected to pay the yearly renewal fee. The latter is the most frustrating and has happened to me only a few times…. The two biggest cases where I felt i was being exhorted is what I’m going to discuss.
According to Wikipedia — Extortion (also called shakedown, outwrestling and exaction) is a criminal offense of obtaining money, property, or services from an individual or institution, through coercion. It is sometimes euphemistically referred to as a “protection racket” since the racketeers often phrase their demands as payment for “protection” from (real or hypothetical) threats from unspecified other parties. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crimegroups. The actual obtainment of money or property is not required to commit the offense. Making a threat of violence which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence is sufficient to commit the offense. Exaction refers not only to extortion or the demanding and obtaining of something through force,[1] but additionally, in its formal definition, means the infliction of something such as pain and suffering or making somebody endure something unpleasant.[2]
In 2007 my ex-partner and I visited California – specifically Pier 39 @ the Fishermen’s Warf in San Francisco. I’ve always been a donut aficionado of sorts and I immediately fell i love with these miniature cake like donuts. I honestly can’t remember the name of the place, but I think it was Trish’s Donuts…. I’m not sure if it was called something different in 2007 or not… If you ever get to SF, I highly recommend you try them!
Anyway I digress, we immediately thought that this may go over well in our home town of WV… Since I’m always eager to organize my thoughts, I started a blog just in case we decided to pursue it called MyDonutBusiness.com. I quickly discovered that I was making money from the blog alone…. it started off slow at first, about 50 bucks a month… then it skyrocketed to upwards of $200-295 per month due mainly to me collecting emails and pushing various related clickbank products. So it did well for about 2 years.. had a nice cash flow… completely auto pilot. I had an autoresponder set up selling various Ebooks and made some money off Adsense when people would visit from search engines and other places around the web. So suffice it to say I did not sit and babysit it.
So…. one day the email and sale notifications trickled down to nothing… I immediately thought the site suffered a Google penalty of some sort. This was before I did much social media marketing, I wasn’t even on Facebook at the time. Myspace was king when I first started the site. So much time had elapsed that someone else had already bought the domain and had it up for sale. This is the final correspondence before I told them to basically Go Fuck Themselves. I mean I’m all for someone making a profit, I would have been willing to pay a premium for my screw up… but the price they wanted was INSANE and Unwarranted to say the least. Was it extortion? Absolutely not (at least not the way I understand it) but it certainly wasn’t good business. I would have gladly paid 2K to get the domain back, that would have been a nice return for them…. without having done all the work that I did to create the site… Anyway, here is a screenshot of the final response I received from the seller in 2013…
So needless to say i DID NOT pay the $15K, they made very little off the domain (standard search engine crap – pennies a month) and I gained BACK control of the domain this past year… They could have made a quick $2K and I would have been on my way. I just let it ride its course, continued to email the subscriber base I collected and made just as much money. It just didn’t grow any. Greed will get you know where.
So my next domain hijack (just a little drama for ya) is a little different but I’ll discuss that next time!!!