It’s been a while since I last wrote a post for Blogged in Traffic and, unfortunately, it’s not a very pleasant update at all. Because last Friday, on February 6, the autounleashed.com domain name was hijacked from our registrar, Namecheap. I’ve been using them for a few years and didn’t have any problems until now. So, here how things took place:

Friday, February 6: Out of the sudden, the blog went down and instead of the usual content, it showed something completely different. Of course, the first reaction was to check what happened, to see if we got hacked or something. We were really surprised and pissed to see that the domain name has been transferred to GoDaddy and the registration info changed (only minor changes, so we suspect it’s an automated service). Then we contacted Namecheap to find out what happened and to solve this issue. Because they have no phone number listed on their website, we had to send them an e-mail and half an hour (and a few angry tweets) later, we got a reply from them, saying that the issue has been forwarded to eNom (Namecheap is a reseller for them) and that the dispute is now between eNom and GoDaddy and they’re sorry, but this matters usually take quite some time to solve. You can imagine we were really ‘thrilled’ to hear that. I also contacted GoDaddy by email and was adviced to send an email to my situation to one of their departments.

Since the domain name was hijacked on Friday afternoon, nothing happened until Monday when we decided to start making some phone calls. First we called eNom. A pretty rude lady checked the domain and said that, since the domain has been transferred to GoDaddy, they’re the ones we should talk to. I said that I spoke with Namecheap and that they said the dispute is now between eNom and GoDaddy, but that didn’t matter, she said I should talk to GoDaddy. I mean, it’s not like it’s their responsability. And with me already being really angry, the last thing I wanted to hear is eNom not giving a shit about my domain name.

So, the next thing I did was call GoDaddy. After about 30 or 40 minutes spent over the phone with them, I was advised to do two things. Fill out a form and send it to the Change Account department and contact their fraud department. Neither of these two departments had phone numbers so I had to send them emails. The Change Account department replied quite fast, but said they can’t help and advised to send an email to a Transfer Dispute department. So, basically, I’ve sent about seven or eight emails to different GoDaddy departments. Oh, and I also got a reply from the email sent on Friday, in which I was being told that it seems I’m currently dealing with this situation with my registrar, eNom, so I should continue doing that. Whatever that means. However, that’s a good thing and it means that eNom started the dispute for my domain.

Now it’s Wednesday and I still haven’t got any replies from GoDaddy or NameCheap. Meanwhile, I considered my options and I will probably move all the content to one of the domain names I own but haven’t used, until I get Autounleashed back. I don’t want to think about how long this will take (I’m hoping it won’t be a couple of months), but you can imagine that the longer it takes, the more devastating the effects for the blog will be. First of all, Google will probably screw me soon, starting to remove me from the search results pages. Seconds of all, I’d like to thank my advertisers, who were really supportive and, after I send them email to tell them about the situation, they replied that this won’t affect our current deals and told me to let them know once the issue is solved so we can proceed with our contracts (of course, I will have to repay their loialty with some free advertising, but it won’t matter, as long as I get my domain back). But, unfortunately, I also have a large share of my revenues from Adsense and CPM networks. And no traffic means…yes…no money.

That’s about it for now, I will update this post as soon as I get news from either of the registrars.

Update 1 (Thursday, February 12) Today I got a reply from Namecheap, saying that they’re currently handling this situation, and now are waiting for a response from GoDaddy. They also said they’ll keep me updated once something new happends. Not really helpful, but at least they answered. However, I also did some reasearch and found a quite similar case, that happened last summer to SolidHost. They got their domain name back in about three weeks, after starting a lawsuit agains NameCheap and eNom. And that’s not comforting at all. I’m gonna wait a few more days and see how things evolve and if I don’t get any good news, I guess I’m really going to start taking into consideration legal actions against the registrars.

Update 2 (Thursday, February 17) Unbelievable, it’s been 11 days and still no email reply from eNom. I called them again today and, after waiting about 20 minutes to get my phone call taken by one of their reps, I was told that all I can do now is wait, and that “this things can take months”. We’ll see if a lawsuit will speed things up a little. Meanwhile, tomorrow we’ll start moving the blog to another domain, because this seems to be the best we can do for now. Damn, this is really starting to get frustrating!