Caught Fabricating Response in UDRP — Domain Owner
Respondent states he met actor in 1999 – 28 years following the actor’s death.
When I first saw the domain name Texican.com was in dispute, I thought the domain owner would win. Following all, there are plenty of firms and entities that use the name “Texican”, so why ought to one complainant get the domain unless it was clearly targeted (not that that hasn’t happened ahead of). It’s also a generic slang term.
But in this case the respondent would have been better off not responding to the complaint since he made a crucial mistake that led the arbitrator to think he fabricated evidence. He stated that he met the actor of the movie “The Texican” in 1999 and wanted to create a site dedicated to him. There’s just one problem: that actor died in 1971.
The panelist wrote:
This story appears to be fabricated since, as noted in the links regarding Audie Murphy that Respondent added to his site following the filing of the Complaint, the actor Audie Murphy died in a plane crash in 1971, twenty-eight years prior to when Respondent claims to have met him. Respondent’s claims thus lack credibility.
On the issue of registration in bad faith, the panelist noted that it was conceivable that the domain wasn’t registered with the complainant Texican Natural Gas Firm in mind, but the respondent’s credibility was in question:
Respondent states that he had not heard of Complainant at the time that he registered the Domain Names in 1999, which might support an argument that Respondent did not register the Domain Names in bad faith (at least as to Complainant). Still, given Respondent’s fabricated statement regarding meeting Audie Murphy in 1999, the Panel is concerned regarding the credibility of Respondent’s other assertions.
