This question was recently asked on the Daily Domainer blog where an associate “was bulk-checking 200+ generic typo domains through a software that shall remain unnamed for now. All of the domains were available. But less than 2 minutes later, more than 50 of the domains had been registered by a number of different offshore companies from the Bahamas.”
As noted, there’s no way this could have been a coincidence. Following this posting, there was another report of searches on estibot and whois.sc, checking four different names on both. Less than 90 seconds later six of the eight were registered by BelgiumNames in Miami. He then writes “The evidence is overwhelming that they were using illegal data sniffing to steal these domains. I have already contacted a very experienced attorney on the matter and I will update when I get further along.”
Following this, the author of Estibot wrote he appreciated the problem being reported, saying “this causes great concern. I can tell you for sure that the searches on EstiBot are not given to any third party. What is happening here is that Belgium Domains is sniffing the whois services, not EstiBot itself. EstiBot performs a whois search for the appraised domains, because it’s an important part of the valuation.” They believe the problem lies with Network Solutions.
To read the entire post on Daily Domainer, see www.dailydomainer.com/2007173-who-is-monitoring-your-domain-searches-update.html
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