This is a first for the domain name industry who had a lot of domain theft incidences but the culprits were never caught. A domain thief of the P2P.com site was charged with theft and other unlawful taking and has been sentenced by the court.
A 26-year-old hacker and thief from New Jersey named Daniel Goncalves is expected to serve five years in jail for the crime of stealing P2P.com from Mark Ostrofsky, Albert Angel and Lesli Angel, and sold it in eBay to Mark Madsen, a NBA player.
This happened in 2005 when Goncalves hacked into the email account of Angel and transferred the P2P.com domain into his GoDaddy account using the Angel’s personal information to get the log-in details of P2P.com. The P2P.com was bought by domain name investor Marc Ostrofsky from Port to Print, Inc., a company based on Wisconsin.
In order to cover up his stealing, Goncalves made a fake Paypal transaction between him and Angel. After this, he sold the domain to Madsen who bought it for $111,211 in 2006. At that time, the NBA player did not know the account was stolen, and was shocked to hear the news. After finding out what happened to his domain name, Angel investigated the crime and found out Godaddy had records showing that the same IP address was used to log in the P2P.com account to transfer the domain, as well as the account used by Goncalves’ account to receive P2P.com.
After learning this, the case was brought by the Angels to New Jersey Florida, and the investigation led to the arrest of Goncalves in 2009 by the New Jersey State Police Cyber Crime Unit.
Earlier today, Goncalves pleaded guilty on the crime that he committed and the complainant and the persecutors are suggesting that he be given five years in jail because it was a crime of theft, despite being online. He has also been charged with theft by deception, theft by unlawful taking, computer theft, identity theft and three counts of falsifying records.
This is indeed a first for the domain name industry as a domain thief was punished and the real owners of P2P.con are now given justice. This is good news and a good sign that domain theft can be solved if investigations were given more focus. Domain thieves are very hard to find because they are all around the world, and the only thing that domain name owners must do is to really have the will and effort to catch the criminal, just like what the Angels did. In this way, justice can be served even in the online industry.
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Tags: Daniel Goncalves domain thief, Daniel Goncalves p2p mark madsen, Daniel Goncalves p2p.com
