They got lucky, because if it were me and I left on mild terms I would be invoicing them $50k a year to renew their domain.
The fact that you can doesn't give you a right to do so and in this case it is pretty clear that you would be acting maliciously.
I've seen such 'tricks' up close a couple of times and judges tend to take a very dim view of this kind of behavior.
“It’s a nice domain you have here, be a shame if something happened to it” sounds cool in the movies, but in the real life it may be treated as extortion and land one in jail.
1. They do not need to pay you. You have zero chance of getting paid.
2. They can easily identify you as a suspect (even with foreign company or whatever) and the police can investigate further.
So you risk going to jail, with no upside.
Trust me, I know of a ex-cofounder in a previous who company who took off and disappeared with $175k from the company bank account, and despite our best efforts at getting justice or the money back, no one really gave a fuck, and there wasn’t much we could do unless we wanted to get into very expensive legal battles using money we didn’t have, against a person that was hard to get a hold of and with no guarantee of getting our money back, at least anytime soon (years). It was much more practical to just cut the losses and move on, making sure we could do everything to prevent it from happening again by someone else.
And the truth is this is how it is for a lot of things, the successful cases you hear of are really just a small percent of the crimes. Just don’t pick a fight with someone who has the money and determination to hunt you down to the bitter end. Most people eventually give up. Unless you’re killing people or running drugs, there’s a lot of criminal arbitrage you can get away with due to how slow and how apathetic the law is.
Though I sometimes do think about the price I would have to pay if there was a reckoning.
The Chickenshit Club (that is, federal prosecutors in the last ten years) means that big company management can get away with white collar crime, paying other peoples’ money to make charges go away.[1]
Workers or little people at big companies are still subject to prosecution for white collar crime. And apparently since criminal prosecutions are time consuming DOJ has decided to deprioritize them, so if you commit white collar crime for small dollar amounts you’re also likely to get away with it.
[1] http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Chickenshit-Club/J... “The Chickenshit Club Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives”
You're not making any sense. You started this entire thread by talking about how you'd hold this $billion+ company's domain ransom for tens of thousands of dollars per year, so your sad tale of woe about how you couldn't afford an attorney to chase down an embezzler is irrelevant.