A 25-year-old Union County native is now facing charges of theft and falsifying of documents after he allegedly stole a company’s peer-to-peer file-sharing domain name before selling it to a National Basketball Association player through eBay.
Investigation showed that Daniel Goncalves, a resident of Union County, New Jersey, hacked into a GoDaddy.com account in a P2P.com, stealing the domain name then sold it to an unwitting NBA player for $111, 211 on popular auctioning website eBay.
The domain was one of the most visited sites in P2P.com. People who owned the websites, which usually has only two to three letter domain names, buy and sell their websites speculating that the value of the domain will grow over time.
Most of these people are members of a large online community who called themselves “domainers.”
The stolen website was owned by a “domainer,” who produces revenue in high-quality since it generated large amount of online traffic, the report added.
The domain name has a shorter length, making it easier to remember, which in turn produces more hits from the users. The popularity of the P2P file-sharing websites has also added to its value that ranges from $160, 000 to $230, 000 before it was stolen.
Based on the obtained court documents, prosecutors alleged that Goncalves has illegally accessed the GoDaddy domain owned by a domainer in P2P.com in May 2006. The suspect then transferred the ownership of the domain name into his personal GoDaddy account.
Prosecutors also alleged that the suspect has moved the domain name to another registrar and has auctioned it on eBay.
Meanwhile, the government prosecutors said that they will not file any charges against NBA player Mark Madsen in connection with the purchase of the said stolen account. They added that the player was unaware that the account was stolen.
In a related development, Goncalves was able to post bail worth $60, 000 for temporary liberty.
Also, the P2P.com domain name will remain held up by the civil court until the judgment was rendered in the near future.