Verisign shouldn’t have transferred domain name — Lawsuit claims

Suit alleges that domain name wasn’t owned by defendants named in class action.

Bitseller, a firm in Cyprus, states that Verisign shouldn’t have transferred the domain name Radaris.com as requested by a court and is asking (pdf) for at least $500,000 in damages.

The backstory is interesting. In 2014, attorneys filed a class action lawsuit against organizations that is stated were running Radaris.com. The lawsuit claimed that Radaris, which aggregates public information regarding individuals and businesses, was not complying with the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

In 2017 the court issued a default judgment against the defendants in that case and ordered Radaris.com to be transferred to the plaintiffs. The domain’s registrar, EuroDNS, refused to transfer the domain. So, as stated by the fresh lawsuit, the plaintiffs took their court order to Verisign and got the domain transferred.

Bitseller states that it operates the Radaris website and that the domain is registered by a firm called Accuracy Consulting. Historical Whois information supports that Accuracy Consulting was the registrant of the domain.

Yet, despite neither Bitseller nor Accuracy being named in the original lawsuit, the domain was transferred. Bitseller and Accuracy got the court in the class action case to determine that the domain ought to be returned.

Bitseller eventually got the name back but argues that it suffered great losses from not having the domain name. It states that Verisign could have easily verified that Accuracy was not named in the lawsuit.

Verisign’s defense in this case will likely be that it was just complying with a court order as it always does. That court ordered stated:

To the extent that the registrars do not assist in changing the registrars of record for the domains under their control within 1 business day of receipt of this Order, the top-level domain (TLD) registrars [sic] (or their administrators) for the Subject Domain Names within 5 business days of receipt of this Order shall change or assist in changing the registrars of record for the Subject Domain Names to a registrar of Plaintiffs’ choosing.