Comment by Marc_Bryan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Marc_Bryan | Hacker News Reader

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They are a bigtime scammers. Recently was assisting a friend to get access to a domain name which was registered in godaddy. They scammed him for a couple of hundred dollars for contacting the domain owner to get a deal on the domain and eventually nothing happened. Not even a mail was sent on behalf the scammed money as we found that the domain was owned by another friend and eventually got it transferred. He confirmed that he has not received any mail from godaddy's domain buy service since the contact was under privacy protection. Another scamming method to siphon money from people.

To make it more clear, if you need a domain which is registered in godaddy and has privacy protection enabled, please do not pay money to godaddy to broker a deal on behalf of you with the existing domain owner. They take huge sum of money, do nothing and stop responding. It's like giving your hard earned money for free to these godaddy scammers. One of the worst registrars and I don't want to open another can of worms with their really really bad service (hosting, emailing and all such services!)

If the domain was a a gTLD or new gTLD (more than 2 characters on the TLD), they could get sanctioned by the ICANN, if you decided to report them.

If it was a ccTLD (2 characters on the TLD), they could also be sanctioned, depending on the rules of the extension.

The sanction can range from a (huge) fee, to a revocation of their accreditation, so it's not nothing.

Why would they be sanctioned? If GoDaddy is the registrar for a domain, GoDaddy knows who the real owner is. They have to, per ICANN rules.

And if GoDaddy reaches out to that customer on behalf of another customer, they don't reveal any private information. Each customer only sees their own interaction with GoDaddy. They don't see each others' info.

The ICANN states that you must provide a way to directly contact a domain's owner. If I'm correct, the contact info must be freely available in the whole, whether it's an email address, an obfuscated email address, or a contact form on the website of the registrar.

Charging for this is really shady, but not contacting the domain owner when requested is a registrar agreement violation.

Note that it's also the responsibility of the registrar to ensure that contact information of their registrants are correct.

I don't think he means sanctioned for contacting the domain owner but sanctioned for taking money without actually doing anything.

They would be sanctioned because they’re a bunch of scammers that take your money without providing a service?

FWIW - I remember reading about the founder of Baremetrics being able to buy Baremetrics.com via this service. Impressive because Baremetrics (which used to be on baremetrics.io) had received a $500K funding by the time he wanted to buy the .com for his company name. GoDaddy seems to have brokered the deal for $616.

Source - https://baremetrics.com/blog/scored-baremetrics-dot-com

I'm not defending GoDaddy here and agree it's a bad service. I do want to add my own anecdote that I had an unused .com domain behind privacy protection with them and GoDaddy contacted me that someone wanted to buy it off of me.

I said yes and their process was extremely fast in the transfer and getting paid.

I use Google Domains now for my stuff.

I hope you charged back the money.

> To make it more clear, if you need a domain which is registered in godaddy and has privacy protection enabled, please do not pay money to godaddy to broker a deal on behalf of you with the existing domain owner.

Thanks for the heads up! Any recommendations for alternative methods for accomplishing this?

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