Man sentenced to prison after assault of domain name owner who refused to sell
justice.gov
justice.gov
I was sympathetic, so I told him what I paid, and offered to sell it back for $200 + $100 for my effort to start over, migrate stuff, etc.
I got a tirade of cursing and accusations back for my trouble.
We all can do our little to teach a-holes of this world a lesson or two in good manners. Nothing crazy or vengeful, but something they can and should take as a lesson to become better human beings. Or suffer, their choice. Even most broken people usually understand that kind of basic logic.
Totally a tangent, but I was once at a time share presentation (I was a stupid kid and they got me in with some free cash or something) and they wanted about $30K for this timeshare which definitely wasn't worth $30K. Hell, the house I was living in ALL the weeks of a year was only about $100K. When I was like, "I can't afford that" they started talking to me about how this $30K timeshare was a great investment. I responded like, "If I had $30K to invest, there are better things to invest in that don't cost me hundreds per year in management fees." The guy brought over his boss who screamed in my face, basically telling me I'm too stupid to invest $30K and I'm wasting his time. I looked around, and everyone was looking at him. I thought to myself, "Dude, you just nuked every possible sale in this room for a sale that was never going to happen."
Yeah, the gall of some people!
> unless he offers 100x more as compensation for his hurtful actions.
Uh, wait
Of course, determining whether a domain is really in use or not is hard, and whatever criteria are adopted, squatters will try to game them.
But of course, ICANN and registars make way too much money from these people to do anything about it. Isn't capitalism just wonderful?
It is easy to detect the egregious cases like you describe.
But, not all cases are so egregious. I might have no website on the domain, yet still be using it for email. Or, I might be hosting some sort of intranet on the domain and all the public can see is a login page, with no idea of what content lies beyond it. Or, I might not be using the domain at all, and just waiting for someone to contact me with an offer to buy it. I might even hook it up with email that I never really use (but which redirects to my actual email), and a login page with nothing behind it, in order to make it look like I am really using it. How to distinguish these cases?
So, the TLD .family was coming to the public, and I kept my eye on it. I wanted <my last name>.family. I learned a lot about TLDs during this time (which I've now forgotten). There is some kind of pre-buy period where you can buy domains before anyone else at an increased price. It was too much for me though, so I waited for the public release.
Then it went public, but, my last name was marked as premium for $1000/year. I felt this wasn't fair, as I can't control my birth name! So I emailed the company in control of the domain, and they got back with me with a deal. $1000 one time payment and $20/year thereafter. Still too rich for my blood...
The level of amateurism / folks just looking for a quick couple dollars was pretty high and what they asked for / got, even based on their own stories, was all over the map.
Many of them didn't care about what they initially ask for even at the risk of scaring off a sale. A lot seemed to be kids or folks with limited resources playing it as a game for fun / in the hopes of striking it rich.
I ran across one that had my name as a .com (something I'd obviously want), had a bunch of back and forth for several years, once or twice every year, and eventually they realized - ya know - nobody with this name is ever going to pay the exorbitant price they wanted, then they let it lapse. Picked it up for $10 or so, instead of $15,000+.
Some of the very short domain names that map to abbreviated company names in China can still be valuable, or if they're somehow truly unique, but for the most part, domain squatting is a dead end for 99% of the domain names at anything less than a very large scale.
Not to mention, owning the domain is a permanent record, so even if they don't check it immediately, the evidence can always resurface years later.
No one with half a brain would risk an assault conviction for a bloody domain name transfer.
But here we are, dumbfounded as we can possibly be.
I might! Provided the domain was something like blockchain.info, myetherwallet.com or some other domain that you could easily use to steal hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency.
Although, if there's a serious risk of an assault conviction then the plan probably just isn't very good.
Just go with a vanity domain and just skip the assault charges. Go with blockchain.christmas or blockchain.website. Problem solved!
The entire situation is a hypothetical, so the only thing you can operate with is assumptions.
I think it'd be an easy case. I'm just glad it didn't come to that and the domain owner is alive and well, all things considered.
I'm also impressed by the fact that the victim shot the attacker several times in the chest yet the attacker survived.
It was the attacker's cousin (who enlisted him to to perform the attack) that was sentenced.
Edit: a comment below mentions that the attacker indeed survived and was sentenced to 20 years: https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/public-safety/cedar-...
It's weird that the Department of Justice's article doesn't mention that...
> This case was brought as part of Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN). PSN is the centerpiece of the Department of Justice’s violent crime reduction efforts.
The attacker in this case:
* Was not just threatening the victim, but physically attacking him even as he complied with the attacker's instructions.
* Was committing a serious felony for which he would be facing a long long prison sentence even if he left the victim alive (as demonstrated here!), meaning the rational self-interested course of action would be to execute the victim after getting what he wanted, to stop him from identifying the attacker.
Whether or not I'd have the courage and presence of mind to do it myself in the victim's place, resisting in this case seems to me like exactly the correct thing to have done, and I suspect it saved the victim's life.
This isn't a junkie wanting your wallet. This is someone forcibly entering your home with weapons and assaulting you.
You have to assume that once you have given up the thing he wants, you remaining alive isn't high on his list of priorities.
The victim lived. He did the right thing.
It's a pretty wild story for being about a website domain name.
TLDR; in a 10ftx10ft room I want a knife.
Yes a gun is not a reactionary weapon you have to pull the trigger, it takes time to process that the victim has now moved to being the attacker and usually if you are within arms reach it is too late for the original attacker to react and pull off the shot before he has lost at least total control of the gun. This is why cops maintain distance when they have someone at gunpoint.
Conversely a knife is a reactionary weapon if you jump at me and I flinch you get cut. Not a whole lot of ways to disarm a knife unless the attacker is actively attacking with it, thus exposing his arm.
This is why 9 times out of 10 in a fight between a person with a gun and a person with a knife, at striking distance, the person with the gun will fair far worse than the person with the knife. The person with the gun has to reorient and shoot again, the person with the knife just has to flail. Knife also leave more damaging wounds when used as a penetrating weapon and have more chance of hitting vitals or an artery.
Here is a great training video of how effective a knife is against someone armed with a gun:
Probably a combination of drugs and stupidity, though I'm not sure which element was more influential.
"A man who enlisted his cousin to break into a Cedar Rapids man’s home and order him at gunpoint to transfer an Internet domain"
If this was just phising attack from phone and keyboard it would be slap on wrist
A relative of mine who works as an administrator at ISU also complained about it at the time. It's not a great thing to have associated with your school, although there isn't much they could do about it.
I thought it was a one-off thing. Now I'm just glad I never needed to associate with that guy.
It's like adblocking. 5+ years ago it was generally enough to target HTML elements with an ID of "advertising-wrapper" or something obvious like that. But ad networks and the sites that implement them got smart and started using generic or randomized IDs so that would work. Then the new method was blocking known advertising domains. Now some of them are starting to serve ads from the same domain you access the site through.
hu? like buying a ton of paid links?
[1] https://onezero.medium.com/the-influencer-and-the-hit-man-6c...
Most people reading the title are going to think this is about some computer tomfoolery, not violence.
So yeah, he wasn't sentenced to 14 years for stealing a domain; he was sentenced to 14 years for concocting a criminal scheme that got his cousin killed. Which isn't quite as juicy as the mental image of some Instagram bro kidnapping and shooting some rando (the victim was shot in the leg during the struggle).
[1]https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/public-safety/cedar-...
> Hopkins put the firearm against the victim’s head and ordered him to follow the directions on the demand note. Hopkins then pistol whipped the victim several times in the head.
A lot of violent rapes get less of a sentence.
1. Steal something from a store. 2. Bring a gun. 3. Show it. 4. Discharge it. 5. Injure someone. 6. Kill someone.
Each of these things make your punishment much harsher, even if your initial thing was to just steal a chocolate bar (1).
Of course this guy is an idiot. The victim bought the domain around the same time he started his “brand” so he may have been squatting. File a trademark and be done with it.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndia/pr/cedar-rapids-felon-sent...
> The victim shot Hopkins multiple times in the chest. He then contacted law enforcement.
> I'm certain he's also criminally liable for the victim getting shot in the leg.
I missed that.
Yeah this article discusses an armed robbery where a firearm was discharged and someone was injured. That is a serious crime that upon conviction results in a serious sentence in any jurisdiction.
It's a violent crime with a lot of premeditation.