A Dubai man, Sami Debizet, filed a lawsuit against Verisign, a .COM registry, in the US District Court in Virginia, to prove his rights to 81.com. According to Debizet, he purchased this domain on May 7, 2013, but it was soon unlawfully transferred to a different owner, something Debizet only recently found out about.
The case appears complicated. First, some observers are questioning the man’s claim. He says the domain was purchased for $360,000. However, two-digit domain names in .COM are extremely rare and much more expensive. According to NameBio, only three such domains have been sold since 2014, and the price was never lower than $1.7 million. But this could be explained by the fact that Debizet bought the domain before the big Chinese surge in short-domain investing, which raised prices in domain markets.
Another question is that, according to the Historical Whois records, between May and September 2013, 81.com was sold three times, Domain Name Wire reports. This means that even if Sami Debizet actually purchased the domain for that amount at the time, he only owned it for a short period of time. Finally, the fact that he only discovered that the domain had been stolen six years after the purchase, doesn’t look good.
