It was three days ago that I bought the domain facebooknut.com through Yahoo Domains. I received a confirmation email saying the registration was completed and I could begin using it, and the transaction appeared in my PayPal account. Flash forward to today, August 6,  and I can’t find facebooknut.com in my Yahoo Small Business domain manager. Not only that, but a whois on the domain showed me that someone in Mumbai, India, has just registered it.

What the heck has happened? Has someone hacked my account? Is the domain transfer not locked by default? I submit a call back request and seconds later I’m talking to a Yahoo customer support rep (who’s clearly not at a call center in India, I might add!). Turns out that Yahoo has a back end program which watches for certain keywords in domains that you register, including “facebook”. It canceled my registration silently.

At no time did I receive any notice that this had happened. The proper way of handling this would have been to warn me right at the time I submitted the domain. This would have afforded me the opportunity to use another registrar that has no such restrictions. Instead, it was swiped by some opportunist in India that has some means of watching lists of newly registered domains, likely checking against whois to see if any fell through.

I needed this domain for a Facebook api faq site, not some phishing scam. Moral of the story: be weary of registering any domain with Yahoo (and possibly others) that contains the name of a top website, product, or company, and  not because you could get sued. Ask what their policy is.

Thanks Yahoo! You’re lucky I don’t sue you!

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Tags: domain registration, yahoo domains