Last week I received an email from a Paul Ginsburg. Some of you may know that name as it was listed back in 2003 as the owner of Horoscopes.com and some other valuable generic domains. However, back in 2003 the whois email was bad and so was the phone number. Sometime around 2004 the name and all other domains associated with Paul Ginsburg were put under privacy. The email offered the name for between 600k and 700k .
My first thought was let’s get on the phone and discuss the name. I asked him to call me. He emailed no. I asked him to give me a phone number so I could call him. He emailed back again that he would not speak on the phone. He would not call me or give me a number to call him. I found that odd especially since it was a high figure deal.
I also noticed that he misspelled the domain horoscopes.com within his subject area (it was spelled correctly within the email). That could be petty but i would think if your asking that much for a six figure domain, you would spell it correctly in the subject area. They did want to use an escrow service, However that left me with no way to substaniate who they were if there were issues. In the end, I decided to pass on the name. I’m sure it will sell at a good price once a buyer finds his own comfort level with the seller of the name. BTW If someone can come up with title insurance for domains, it has the potential to be a good business.
Be careful!
If I have a name for sale at $600K, and you want it, you can call me at 3AM if you want 🙂
Something similar happened back in October, when someone hijacked Antoine Toffa’s domains:
BRANDS.COM
COMPANIES.COM
POLLS.COM
OPINIONS.COM
SCHEDULES.COM
FLYBEST.COM
Luckily, I was a buyer that was contacted, and I got ahold of Antoine and the situation was fixed.
However, in the hijacked situation the domains were offered too cheap.
Anyways, be careful – not wanting to talk on the phone or use escrow.com is always very iffy.
GL w/ it.
PS: If you have $500K burning a hole in your pocket, email me… I can help 😉
Aron
I am not astonished, some don’t want to speak by phone even when it’s a 6 figure offer and others not even respond by email when you offer them +4 times the appraisal value.
It’s happening actually for me a for a name I want for a long time, it’s very frustrating and more when it’s for a site and not for resell and that you are offering the maximum you currently can.
So I can understand your frustration and disapointment Larry 😉
Had the email aswell, I didn’t look at it in much detail but it looked stolen just from the contruction of the email.
LOL I get it francois and will email you separately.
as for this name, It’s amazing as he emailed me with the asking price. i can understand not getting a response if I blindly emailed him.
I agree that you always have to be careful. I do not know if the email I received was legit or not, but i would have felt more comfortable speaking with the person. It may indeed be the owner, however I just did not feel comfortable without getting more details which i was unable to get. BTW, what would you value Horoscopes.com at?
snoopy,
Yes, the emails that I received were worded rather poorly.
larry
Yes Larry,
The thing that I took most note of was the email address, a gmail address ending in a number (the kind of address that sounds like it was just registered). The Iranian domain thief often uses email addresses of similar style.
Larry,
Not only will I speak on the phone with you but I will party with you all night until 5AM such as we did at DomainFest:)
Thanks, Jim
Jim,
LOL. I’m still feeling the effects of that.
all the best larry
There’s something big going on lately, and people need to be very careful before purchasing names.
Last week, I was about to purchase Nursery.com, and the seller also insisted on Escrow.com (not that this is a problem, but clearly they do not want you seeing where the money is being wired to). I decided it would be a good idea to speak with the owner before progressing, but the Whois had a non-working number. Upon looking at the Whois history, I noticed around December 2009 that the admin email was changed from a permanent address to an AOL address. The tricky thing about this is that the thief registered the first and last name @AOL.com. I was able to contact the real owner, who confirmed my fears. They did get the name back.
The next day, it dawned on me that I had inquired about another name, Luxembourg.com, that also replied with a first name last name AOL.com address. Sure enough, after using the Whois history tool, that one also appeared to be stolen (no luck yet reaching the real owner). The email pattern with Nursery.com and Luxembourg.com were nearly identical. No question in my mind it’s stolen.
I’ll say it again: Something big is going on, and I have a strong feeling we are about to see thefts on a scale we have never seen before!
Horoscopes.com is a tough one, because there is whois privacy on the domain. Which opens up a whole new set of problems if you cannot identify a whois change. All you can do is follow your instincts. Something doesn’t feel right, then it probably isn’t. Also, the Domain Tools Whois History tool is a no brainer.
“Horoscopes.com is a tough one, because there is whois privacy on the domain.”
Netsols “so called” lame whois privacy still shows the owners name as PGinsberg, whether or not he’s still got control of it I don’t know?
I just took a look at another 5 names he owns at Netsol, one was developed and 4 are parked at Namedrive…some golden oldies !
I think I’d have to meet face to face before coughing up that sort of money on a domain…that’s alot of dosh to risk 🙂
He emailed me as well. Same story, he wouldnt provide a phone #. good luck with it.
He also emailed me! I offered him $150k thru escrow.com and asked him to give me a call…he never called, but he emailed me back saying that he wants $700k…i asked him if i could test the traffic stats…he said he will only let me test the domain traffic stats after the payment clears thru escrow.com …he said the domain receives 25k unique visitors per day and then he emailed me the stats…the stats show “hits” not unique visitors…last month stats shows 762k hits and 2.7 GB storage…huge difference in hits and unique visitors!
So what do you guys think this domain name is worth? valuate.com shows its worth $376k…what do you guys think?
How much traffic do you think it gets and how much do you think it would make on parking?
Paul owns some other great names, like Drive.com crosswords.com etc… I know that his PO box is still active, this was confirmed by the post office, but he never did respond to my certified letters.
He is a hard man to find, the last trace I could find was his response in court to the hijacking attempt of drive.com
I think 600k is probably a bit too high for a domainer, but an end user who has a history of successful development might make a price like that work.
sam,
i have a PO BOX that has been active for 8 years. I still receive email for older owners of that box. When I try to give it back to post office, they tell me they no longer have access to those people and they get disposed. Just because the letters reach his PO box and they dont return them, does not mean he still has the box.
That comment from snoopy about gmail sounds familiar. We all get lots of email from buyers and sellers using gmail. My standard response is “I do not discuss business of any kind using gmail addresses”. Short and to the point. They almost never write back… makes you wonder…