Anyone who owns several domain names knows that they can be valuable pieces of internet real estate. When recently my work load got a bit overwhelming, I forgot to renew one of my domains. I own the .net and .com versions of this domain because in the future I plan to use this name.

So after the domain expired I called Godaddy to check about getting the domain back before it dropped into the public pool. They told me the domain was in the reclamation period and that I could re-acquire it for $80. Well $80 is quite a bit if you understand that I paid $6.95 for it originally. Now I love Godaddy and I understand that they have to make money somehow and it was a mistake that I made. So I’ll forgive Godaddy there.

Now I figured hey, eventually it would just fall back into the public pool at the end of the reclamation period and I’d have it. I know I was taking a risk but this domain name probably would only be valuable to someone here in Colorado Springs so I risked it.

On May 2, approximately a week after the reclamation period ended, I got an email from a man calling himself Ken Palm. His email stated that he had acquired the domain and that he would sell it to me since I still owned the .net version. He gave me a link to go look at the price and my curiosity was peaked so I took a look. To my surprise, he was asking over $400 for it. He said that that cost covered acquisition costs (yeah right) and a modest profit.

On May 6, after getting at least 6 emails from Mr. Palm, I received another email stating that they were discounting my domain by a whopping $250. Now I’m not a rocket scientist but this just seemed strange. Of course I just resigned to letting someone else get it because honestly, I don’t have $200+ to pay for a domain.

I’m not sure how Mr Palm was able to get a domain immediately after reclamation, and then be able to offer it for sale and then magically less than 30 days later it drops back into the public pool without another 90 day reclamation period but to my surprise this morning, it was available and I picked it up for $6.95 again.

My theory about this process is that after the reclamation period, Godaddy auctions off the domain names and allows interested parties to “purchase” them. So an interested party can investigate a domain and see if that domain has sister domains (.net,.org etc.) that are owned by the previous owner and then start soliciting a large sum to re-acquire the domain. If the previous owner shows interest, they purchase the domain from godaddy for as little as $6.95 or whatever their wholesale cost is and then markup the domain and make $400+ on something that all they did was send a few emails about.

I’m all for capitalism and I’m sure that this little trick has worked on some poor guy or gal that doesn’t understand the process but that’s an insane amount of money to pay for a domain. Now do I wish I was the guy that squatted on pizza.com and made a million bucks on it? Sure. But when the domain name obviously doesn’t have any value except to the person that bought it, it seems a little like black mail seeing as they play on your fear of losing it.

At any rate, I just wanted to write this so that someone else in my shoes doesn’t fall for this in desparation. Of course if it is a domain name that has world wide significance, you may just want to pay the $80 to Godaddy and re-acquire it. In this case, this guy didn’t even buy the domain, all I can figure is that they place it under retainer from the registrar while they try and get the previous owner to put up a large sum of money which they get for sending a few emails. Ingenious but completely unnecessary.

Beware.