Dodgy domain dealings

The internet is strewn with potential pitfalls and scams for the unwarey, but this week I discovered one that was new even to me.

I've been spending the past week or two racking my brains for a good website address. I've generally used the website bb-online.co.uk as this shows the availability of all domains on a page at once. What I began to realise, however, is that a day or so after I'd looked at a domain the .com version of that domain would magically become registered, meaning that if I'd really wanted that domain I would have had to stump up a not inconsiderable amount of cash, and certainly many times more than the standard domain registration fee, to secure it. Even more sneaky was the fact that the registration date wasn't today's or yesterday's date but a much earlier date, which clearly it couldn't have been and must have been faked or forged somehow.

I didn't quite deduce whether this was due to the particular website I used for the search or whether someone was intercepting the searches upstream and automatically registering. In any case it's another instance of 'buyer beware' and that if you do see what you're looking for it might be best securing it quickly. Fortunately for me when I did finally come across the right domain I new it and bought it without delay and at least I must have racked up some domain registration costs for the company that was trying to fiddle me out of a domain.