A lawsuit (pdf) filed in U.S. District Court in Virginia yesterday alleges that 699.com is a stolen domain name.
Plaintiffs Xinming Zeng and Zaiyan Wang say they are the rightful owners of the domain name and that it was stolen from their GoDaddy account around September of last year. They learned about the apparent theft late last year.
Oddly, the in rem lawsuit states, “Currently, the Domain Name is still under the unauthorized control of Defendant [John Doe] and is being maintained at GoDaddy. The Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) domain status code is currently “clientTransferProhibited” meaning that it is not possible to transfer the domain name registration without first contacting the registrar and requesting that they remove the status code.”
Whois history shows that the domain has actually moved between registrars since the alleged theft, and the lawsuit even mentions that the contact email address is now at Dynadot. Whois records show the domain moved from GoDaddy to Metaregistrar before landing at Dynadot.
War IP Law PLLC and Ni, Wang & Masssand, PLLC are representing the plaintiffs.
