Why has our local cricket club's domain name been sold?

I run my local cricket club website www.otrcricket.com. Two weeks ago it began to display nothing but adverts of no consequence to the cricket club.

I phoned the club member who registered the domain and found that he had been in a car accident and was still in hospital. I needed to contact a web company called 123 Domains, which put me in contact with a company called Tucows.

I found out that the website domain had been sold and the person, Alex Chung in Canada, who now owns it, wanted £300 to release it.
Victor Isaacs

We know the internet is infested with the lowlifes of this world and most people usually think of them as paedophiles or thieves trying to steal their information.

Sadly, there are others, who quite legally, although you may believe immorally, try to get you to open your wallet and part with your cash, as this issue over lapsed domain names shows.

We recently worked hard to try to recover the .com domain name for Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn. Like Mr Isaacs, he had hired a third party to handle the registration and to ensure the domain name was kept live and pay the ongoing registration fees.

The failure of this person to do this meant Mr Littlejohn lost control of the domain name and subsequently the website he had set up.

As Mr Isaacs discovered, if a domain name lapses, there are plenty of people out there who will immediately snap it up in the hopes of making a lot of money by ‘selling’ it back to you.

In Mr Isaacs' case, one Alex Chung realises that domain-name ‘squatting’ is a lucrative business. In both these cases, it is the failure of the third party to ensure that the renewal fees for the domains were paid.

What both these cases illustrate is that many people don’t understand how the registration of a domain name works. If the owner of a domain fails to renew by the expiration date it goes into what is called an 'expired' status for 40 days.

The person can still buy it back for the standard renewal fee but failure to do this means the domain enters what is called the ‘redemption period’ and finally to the deletion phase. Five days after the last phase, it is available for anyone to register, and cybersquatters will have been keeping their eye on these domains.

You can take the matter to court but it would be likely to cost thousands of pounds in legal fees to get the name back; so only big companies will go down this route.

The only thing to do in a case such as this is to place the expired domain on ‘back order’ – so you can get it back if the new registrant lets the lease lapse.