A cautionary tale

Hi everyone,

We have just finished assisting a merchant who has been through the painful experience of having his website domain name stolen by another company. While it has had a happy ending it has been a nightmare for the merchant and the cause of a lot of stress for him.

This happened because the merchant had his email account hacked by the other company who then redirected the reminder emails for him to renew his domain name registration.

As soon as his registration expired, the other company purchased the domain name then tried to sell it back to him for $50,000.

To get around this, the merchant purchased a new domain name which was simply his old one with the word ‘shop’ on the end, we migrated all of his files, email addresses, and databases across to the new domain and used 301 redirections to ensure all of his customers were redirected to the new domain and his business could continue operating.

This solution worked great whilst the merchant took legal action, luckily for him, and rightly so, he succeeded and the extortion company now look like being charged by the police.

I found this whole saga to be extremely interesting and I wanted to share it with you, not only as an interesting story, but as a warning of one of the many dangers of owning an online shop.

The big lesson here is to never lose control of your domain name. Do not let it expire, do not let anyone else have the log in details and always ensure you have it locked!

Happy Selling!

Cam

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