Domain Magnate

eBay has filed suit against Digital Point Solutions, best known as the owner of one of the more popular web site owner communities, and others over an alleged cookie stuffing scheme.

According to the filing lodged in the Northern California District Court, Shawn Hogan and Digital Point Solutions, Todd Dunning and Kessler’s Flying Circus, and Brian Dunning and Thunderwood Holdings defrauded eBay in a “cookie stuffing” scheme that made it appear that their companies should be paid commissions on eBay affiliate sales.

The scheme worked like this: users were automatically redirected to eBay without clicking on an eBay advertisement, resulting in an affiliate cookie being place on each users computer marked with the defendants affiliate code so that for future purchases they received a cut.

The complaint alleges that the defendants tried to hide their scheme, using “deceptive means to prevent it from discovering the fraud, and to conceal it.” eBay is demanding “compensatory, treble and punitive damages.”

It’s not clear whether users on Digital Point itself were redirected under the scheme, but it would appear from the filing that there was a direct relationship at least on some levels.

In one way, it’s so simple as to be brilliant, but did they really think they could get away with it, or better still that eBay wouldn’t notice?

Needless to say the scheme has been around for almost as long as the Affiliate marketing itself, however lately due to multiple posts on digitalpoint forums it must have spread out widely and gotten  out of hands.

The story is duscussed almost everywhere in the web:

 DP thread, 1, 2 , WickedFire, Sitepoint thread, blackhatworld, Digg and many more places. Will be interesting to see how it ends.

It was reported today on DNF that a large amount of quality LLLL.com domains were stolen, among them egf.com, neoo.com, elli.com, gtoy.com, lave.com, sibe.com, ftc.net, 3004.COM GEHO.COM, gmile.com, mopi.com:

The domains as shown below were transferred illegaly on 13,14,15 April,2008 by unknown domain hacker.
The original legal owner is Goi Media(Heongho Kim),he reported all suspected fraud to the cybercrime police and consulted a lawyer about the case.

Currently,the cybercrime police investigate this case seriously.
The owner submitted the domain list to the police,and opened to the public to prevent the hacker from reselling them.

Therefore,the legal owner warned anyo read more »

Rick reported this recently on his blog:

It appears GoDaddy.com gives you the option to cancel a transfer, after you have done an account change and the new owner has accepted the domain. How ludicrous is this? I’ve just had it happen a second time. Someone sends you a name, so you send them the money. The next thing they know, they pull it back! All they have to do is go to their account, go to pending account changes, check the box and click cancel. They can do this after it is finished!

Now in both cases it worked out fine because they had pulled it back because of a misunderstanding and quickly did another account change. It still leaves a huge door open for fraud.

I’m sure other registrars would let you pull back a domain as well, after you’ve pushed it.

I suppose it’s been around for a while, but this is the first time I hear about that and this could be a serious problem. Another reason to avoid godaddy and to be extra cautious, especially when dealing with new people.