Several lawsuits have been filed in the U.S. District Court in Virginia recently to recover the owners’ rights to three-letter domain names in the biggest and oldest registered .com domain. Virginia is where the .com registry Verisign is located.
As Domain Name Wire reports, one of the lawsuits related to the eqn.com domain was filed by California-based Blackshore Properties, Inc., which acquired eqn.com at the NameJet auction in 2011 for $4,950. According to Whois DomainTools, the domain name was transferred to a Chinese registrant in 2016. The lawsuit alleges that this transfer was theft.
Another action was filed by Yoshiki Okada from Japan. He claims that nine valuable three-letter domains were stolen from him (among them nnn.com and wok.com).
The publication notes that assuming no one shows up to defend the in rem lawsuit in Virginia, the judge will likely enter an order of default judgment and order Verisign to transfer the domain name. This is a common practice in such cases when the stolen domain was sold again, and in this case the scrupulous buyer can try to defend the domain name.
