easyman

I recently paid £600 for a domain (.co.uk) plus £10 registration fee. Before handing payment I checked the whois records to make sure the domain had been renewed because I knew it was nearing deletion.

To my utter dismay I found out that the unscrupulous seller had reversed the domain renewal payment. As such, the domains was days away from deletion. Fortunately, for me I caught it in time.

I will posting full details of the TAG holder here unless I get a reasonable explanation from him.

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GreyWing

Mate you can't just do that on purpose (reverse payment etc), what would probably have happened is that there has been a cock up with the Nominet invoices and they haven't been paid on time. It happened to me today, I changed card numbers and the bill wasn't paid. Nominet send me an email and quickly resolved.

It happens a lot and to actually plan to do on purpose and benefit from it, what you said they have done takes one hell of a lot of planning.

Even without knowing who it was, I think there is little chance of this being a deliberate scam.

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retired_member12

Just out of interest, how did you get to find out about it?

easyman

Contacted Nominet support but as Greywing says probably a mix up regarding invoicing.

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Skinner

A seller did something similar to me, and he's been a domainer for years, so I assume was a deliberate act, especially since they refused to even answer my email asking what happened.

Nominet wasn't much help when I asked them what happened.

All i got was the 7 day expiry notice email, if I hadn't gotten that I've have never known and would have lost the name.

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GreyWing

Thing is though that their is very little reason for a seller to do it, that's why I can't see it ever being a scam.

If it was a valuable name someone has bought the name then the person who sold it must realise that catchers will attempt to get it if it expires and they would have little chance of benefitting from it.

If it's not a valuable name, then why would the seller bother to ruin his reputation in the domain game?

Plus if was somehow reregistered by the seller and the buyer looked into it, the seller's reputation is all but ruined in this game if they didn't give it back immediately and they probably wouldn't sell a name again.

I'm not saying you are wrong, just I can't see why a seller would do it.

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HariSeldon

Surely no-one would deliberately try to reverse a domain renewal payment all for the sake of a fiver?!?

easyman

Upon further investigation we have found that the seller had paid for the renewal but it had not be processed at the time it was being transferred. Nominet subsequently contacted the seller to say the renewal had not been processed but the seller decided to ignore it!

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HariSeldon

I can fully understand how annoyed you are/were to find all this out after the event but to be fair to the seller this seems quite different to the original assertion of "the unscrupulous seller had reversed the domain renewal payment" and that this was a scam.

Very Annoying? Yes. Unprofessional? Maybe. A scam? No.

On a positive note, this is a good lesson/reminder to always do a final check on the Whois when buying a domain, something I know I'm poor at myself.