Oversee.net's Chesterton Holdings carry on domain swiping as Maltuzi Holdings

The world of domain swiping continues unabated. Oversee.net and their operations, who I covered before, continue to domain taste and, apparently, to domain swipe.

To summarize:

• Chesterton Holdings swipe domains following whois searches in online whois portals
• Chesterton Holdings register those domains through NameKing.com
• Chesterton Holdings use the Information.com service to monetize the domains

The same goes for Jucco, Munchale, and LaPorte, and all of the other "holdings" companies.

And the link to Oversee.net?

• Oversee.net own NameKing.com, their pet domain registrar
• Oversee.net own DomainSponsor, which operates Information.com
• Oversee.net share a corporate HQ with Chesterton Holdings

You can read the original post for more details on the connection between Chesterton Holdings and Oversee.net.

Since I detailed the links between the domain swipers at Chesterton Holdings and Oversee.net, Oversee have publicly admitted the connection between Oversee.net and Name King, the registrar they use to make their "domain tasting" operation possible:

My name is Jothan Frakes. As Tim mentioned, I'm a senior account manager at a company called Domain Sponsor. In the interest of full disclosure and to make sure there's integrity to this session, I do want to disclose that my parent company [Oversee] owns a registrar, Name King, and that company does participate on behalf of its customers for domain tasting or add grace use.

While checking to see if Chesterton were still going, I found that only the websites for the "holdings" companies Jucco and Field Lake and Sky remain, with an obvious reference to "Chesterton Holdings LLC" in the code for their webpages. I also stumbled across a page describing the operations of an apparently new company, "Maltuzi Holdings". Chesterton have gone fairly quiet, and it should be no surprise that Maltuzi are just a new incarnation. They have garnered the same attention and reputation as Chesterton did at first, yet the connection between Maltuzi and Chesterton has not been noticed.

In case there is any doubt about the connection, the Maltuzi website shares the same reference to Chesterton in its code as the Jucco and Field Lake and Sky websites:

<param name="movie" value="Chesterton Holdings LLC.swf">

Sure, more care may have been taken on the company address, using a forwarding address in the "Downtown Mountain View Center", but the registered agent used for their company registration is identical to that used for Chesterton Holdings.

Maltuzi also uses NameKing.com and the Information.com services, owned by Oversee.net, just as Chesterton Holdings did.

There are a lot of complaints about Maltuzi (inevitably, given that they are swiping domains).

Business Week seem to have got a response out of Maltuzi:

T. Salonen, manager of Mountain View (Calif.)-based Maltuzi, says his company is a "bulk registrant" of domain names, but says there's nothing wrong with that. "We are actively buying domain names based on a variety of criteria," he writes in an e-mail interview. "We...purchase those domain names which have certain traffic levels or pay-per-click viability and return those which do not meet those and other criteria."

That doesn't say very much at all that we didn't already know, and very little about domain swiping, or the connection between Maltuzi and Oversee.net.

Specific sources for the swiped domains are again unclear, but one post describes using Instant Domain Search, and then losing a domain to Maltuzi, which fits the previous method identified by Larry Seltzer: the CNet Domain Search page.

DomainTools (run by Name Intelligence) claim that domain swiping is a myth, and that names are simply registered by coincidence, but that doesn't line up with the facts. Instant Domain Search are similarly dismissive in replies to a blog post fingering their site as a source of domain name leaks. Did Chesterton really register "lickmynose.com" by complete coincidence, so soon after Larry looked it up? I think not!

If there are markets of whois query information inside the lookup and registrar communities then having NameKing.com gives Oversee.net (and so Chesterton, Maltuzi, etc.) easy access, whatever the methods. My favorite theory is that the whois meta searches go off and query every accredited registrar: NameKing.com is the registrar owned by Oversee.net, who appear to also operate Maltuzi... easy.

The ups and downs of the Maltuzi domain portfolio can be followed at the excellent IPWalk, and they feature high in DailyChanges and the DomainDB top DNS lists. We're talking seven figures of domains, and daily changes of six figures, as before with Chesterton and friends.

Domain tasting and swiping are still very much in the news, but with major benefactors such as Oversee.net involved in ICANN and not fully disclosing what they do under the banner of "holdings" companies, the prospects for eliminating domain tasting and swiping or discovering exactly how Oversee's holdings operations are "swiping" domains appear remote.

A step has been taken in the right direction by the .org registry, but whether that is effective and how the rest of the name space is dealt with by the industry and by ICANN remains to be seen.

Oversee.net and Maltuzi did not respond to queries.

Domain swiping is an abuse of the trust that users place in the whois services, and domain tasting is causing real harm to others, such as real costs for registrars. If the domains involved are typo-squatting (as a great many are) then users are being manipulated into visiting sites that they never intended to visit, and trademarks are being abused.

None of domain swiping, tasting or typo-squatting are spam, but they all demonstrate the same contempt for others that characterizes spam.