[jeffmould]

There are so many red flags in this story, I have a hard time gaining even the slightest sympathy for the OP. Yes, PayPal has currently, and always has had, crappy practices when it comes to customer service and disputes. That's not news in my books and comes as absolutely no surprise.

Where I got lost though is the selling of an extremely valuable asset such as shop.com (a four-letter, dictionary, brandable, .com domain) at well under value. The first lesson in fraud detection is that if it seems to good to be true it probably is. A domain that probably has a value at close to a $1M going for under $1000 would fit the definition of too good to be true. Yeah, partners break up and can do some angry things, but selling an asset at such a heavily discounted price would certainly be shocking to me. A little more due diligence on buyer side would have prevented this. Otherwise I have a 100 foot yacht and an ocean front property in Nevada for sale for $1000 if you are interested. :) I mean even PayPal warns flat out warns about these types of transactions (https://www.paypal.com/eBay/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/fraud-t...)

To me this entire story is like saying I went to Walmart and parked my car. They have security cameras in the parking lot and I asked an employee if those cameras were monitored. The employee told me yes so I left the windows down in my car with my laptop and a wallet full of cash on the seat. I was only going in the store for a minute and I felt assured that if anyone stole them I could easily identify them and get my stuff back. When I came out everything was gone. When I asked the security guard to review the footage I could not see who the people were and could not identify them. I am now going to complain about Walmart's security practices because of this incident.

The good news for the OP is that at least he has ads on his site and I am sure the traffic he is getting from this post he may make back a few of those lost dollars in ad revenue :)

[larrys]

Just so you know the filter that people who own and trade domains is actually much better than even what the OP (and you) are describing. It's actually more like "a 3 letter .com being sold for $5,000" where the 3 letters aren't particularly memorable and the domain might typically be worth $10k. You'd have to be in the business to really know the risk involved.

With domains you have to make sure you know the history of the domain (which takes a bit of research) and additionally most people in the domain business, at least with valuable domains, tend to use escrow.com as an intermediary to make sure there is recourse.

That said another thing to watch out for is buying a domain which has been stolen from someone which does happen. In that case a domain is priced attractively (not to cheap not to expensive) and unloaded quickly before the real owner even knows what has happened. This can happen as a result of a simple hijacking of an email address (of the rightful owner) or by social engineering the registrar. As only two examples. That is much harder to detect and even in the case of using escrow.com you would still be out of the domain once it gets yanked back to the original registrant.

Source of the above: Me, I've been doing this for almost 20 years and get paid to buy names as well as buy on my own account.

[notahacker]

It has to be said that "domain stolen from rights holder" is the only reason why anyone actually having control over a highly-sought after term which is the brand of an active commercial web property would want to sell it on a standalone basis for $500.