Digital.com Bought For $373,750 In July Is Being Transferred Out Of Moniker

The domain name Digital.com that was bought for $373,750 this July is being transferred out of Moniker. I believe that it is transferred out by its rightful owner. If not then this post will serve as a warning.

A couple of days back Moniker send emails to all its users with new passwords and asked them to change the passwords immediately. It was later reported that this was done after a massive hacking that resulted in many valuable domain names being stolen from various Moniker accounts. So I believe that this transfer is directly related with this.

The domain Digital.com was sold by Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) on the latest Heritage Auctions (HA) premium domain name auction that was held back on July 2014.

The domain Digital.com was bought for $373,750 by Richard Kershaw.

The domain was actually transferred into Moniker on the 10th of September from MarkMonitor.com that was the HP registrar of choice.

The domain displays a “pendingTransfer” Domain Status since yesterday the 7th of October but I am a bit skeptical if the transfer will be successful.

That is because the The Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy, applicable to all ICANN-accredited registrars that provides that registered name holders must be able to transfer their domain name registrations between registrars, says that you must wait 60 days after the initial registration or any previous transfers to initiate a transfer. So while Moniker can deny the transfer, I am not sure if it actually can circumvent this rule and allow Digital.com to be transferred out after less than 30 days.

I found out that Digital.com was pending transfer as I had a DomainTools.com domain monitor alert on the domain after it was sold on the HA auction so that it would alert me on the registrant change.

Last week I discovered that Future Media Architects (FMA), owned by domainer Thunayan K AL-Ghanim (aka “Elequa”), had transferred thousands of domains names out of Moniker to Uniregistry. I then understood that this move was probably done after the hacking attempt on Moniker was successful and resulted in FMA loosing a few very valuable domains such as YN.com and BIT.com to thieves.

I can only imagine how many domains Moniker will loose over the next few days. It now has more than 2.5 million domains and I expect it to loose at least a million registrations in just a few weeks. I have been transferring domains out since the new control panel and system was introduced and created this whole mess.

Be extra careful as Moniker is not even logging domain pushes between Moniker accounts and is not sending any confirmation emails. This is “How To Check If Any Of Your Domains Have Been Stolen From Moniker”.