A 25-year-old law firm computer technician was arrested by the News Jersey State Police after allegedly hacking into GoDaddy.com and stealing two domain accounts in peer-to-peer file-sharing before selling the rights to National Basketball Association player Mark Madsen.
Jersey Police identified the suspect was Daniel Gonclaves, a computer technician, who was accused of hacking into the accounts belonging to Leslie and Albert Angel.
The suspect allegedly transferred the name rights of the P2P.com domain so that he could auction it on oneBay. Reports said that it was NBA player Mark Madsen of the Los Angeles Clippers who won the auction for $111, 000.
NJ authorities said that the suspect made a mistake by naming the stolen domain under his name, which led the police into his residence. It was the first ever domain theft arrest that was made by authorities.
In its investigation, police said that Gonclaves was able to acquire the login information of the Angels’s GoDaddy account after being able to break the password of the couple’s AOL account.
He then requested for all the necessary information to access the said domain. After being able to access the Angel’s GoDaddy domain, the suspect then transferred the registration of the domain into another account which was listed under his name.
Gonclaves even created a simulated Paypal.com transaction to make it appear that he legitimately bought the domain account to the Angels. It was said that he “bought” the account for only $1, 500.
The suspect was using an alias consisting his first name and his girlfriend’s last name, or as Daniel Louvado.
If proven guilty, Gonclaves could land a jail term of up to 30 years.
Meanwhile, Madsen denied that he had any link to Gonclaves, saying that he didn’t know that it was stolen.
The NBA player plans to resell the rights for the domain on eBay, which might land him $200, 000 or more.