Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Castle Doctrine and GoDaddy.com

Picture this:

You and a close friend have a turbulent parting of the ways, and during the divide, one of their monogrammed items is left inside your house.

Rather than contacting you and making arrangements for the return of the item, they break into your home, change all the locks, and implement a code based security system for entry.

Once they have taken over your home, they decide that anything in your house is theirs.

You contact the appropriate authorities, and after investigating, they inform you that your friend was well within their rights, since it is their monogrammed item.

However, the monogram is merely initials, and doesn’t even specify your former friend’s name.

A similar episode just happened to me recently.

My GoDaddy account was hacked by a former business/relationship, simply because he didn’t want to request a transfer of a domain which theoretically names his business.

However the name is not unique or uncommon, and even his IT professional who runs the network and VoIP phones for his company has said that the domain is NOT the one used by the company in print, social media, printed company materials,and advertising.

Once inside my account, he has claimed that he has full rights to the other domains within the account, as well as all the account records dating back years before we developed any type of relationship.

GoDaddy’s response has been equally culpable, to say the least. They not only allowed him access to my account, they have failed to reinstate my ownership.

Additionally, they have failed to turn over any of the other domains that I held in the account.

Apparently they don’t care about legalities, non-tangible possessions, or failure to obey telecommunications law.

All GoDaddy is focused on is soaking up as much money as they can from their users. And they saw an easy mark in this guy.

He actually bragged about “spending a few hundred dollars” after one phone conversation with GoDaddy customer service.

No wonder they are aiding and abetting a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2) and 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(4), after all, more money for them.

He is gullible to say the least, and believes anything even a barely adequate salesman tells him, so he is an easy mark for the seasoned professionals at GoDaddy.

My thoughts? A person’s home is their castle and they have the right to defend it - so I am enlisting the assistance of law enforcement at all levels possible.

What’s mine is mine, and not his to illegally seize, especially when he never made the appropriate request for transfer of the domain in question.

Normally, extreme measures are left for when you have exhausted all remedies on an increasing basis with no results. Apparently the policies in place at GoDaddy are mere “window dressing” and aren’t even taken seriously by their own employees.

That’s okay, break USC and it can be referred to Federal agencies such as DOJ and FBI. And since I actually did follow all the protocols requested by GoDaddy, with no results, escalation is a natural consequence.

Let the chips fall where they may.