Domain hijacking is not something I had really come across directly until the last few days, although it seems a not altogether uncommon problem.

The case I got involved with goes something like this… Business owner gets a (non-professional) “developer”, who happens to be a relative of a friend to setup a website/shopping cart for him. The task includes purchasing a new domain for the site.

The website was duly setup and operated for some time by the Business Owner. Recently, the “developer” has decided to copy the business owner’s operation and set up in business himself selling the same products. As he had access to the product distribution contacts, client lists, product images, etc, this was relatively easy to do.

The real crunch came when we found that the domain purchased, under which the business owner had been trading for a considerable period of time, was in fact registered under the developer’s name, and was completely under his control. This led to the developer being able to redirect the domain to a site of his choosing, effectively killing the business owner’s trade overnight.

Now, this situation isn’t completely irrecoverable, but it’s certainly not a situation you would want to put yourself in if you can avoid it. Imagine if the daily traffic you receive to your site, which is directly attributed to referrals and searches based on your domain name were removed at a stroke – certainly it would take a good deal of time to recover from this situation.

The lesson here is that you need to be careful to use reputable agents when buying new domain names. This is especially true if you are leaving it to them to enter all the registration details and to look after configuration of things on your behalf (perhaps because you don’t feel confident enough to do it, or don’t have the time).