Usually when it comes to building a website you first need to determine the domain name of the site and then check if it is actually available. You can usually do this through various registrars and even third party domain whois searches. A few days ago I was actually thinking of getting someone a domain name as a gift for their future endeavors which is kind of an obscure name for the most part. So, I did a search and sure enough it was available.
After thinking about it for a few days I figured why not and register it. However, to my surprise someone has registered the domain name. What are the odds right? In checking the records to see who registered it, funny enough it didn’t look it was from a regular person and the domain seemed to have been taken pretty much on the same day I did the search. It was registered to Cloudflare, Inc and virtually all of the information on it said “DATA REDACTED”.
Apparently what had happened is this company or another affiliated with it committed what is known as domain fronting. It is essentially companies using internal data where when someone searches for a domain name that information is then used to quickly register the domain with the assumption that someone wants it. Therefore, if accurate the company can then resell it for even more money to whomever was looking to buy it.
To my knowledge there is no laws against this practice in general. Fortunately this wasn’t an urgent or very serious registration. The lesson here is if there is a domain name you are more than fifty percent sure that you may want to register then do it to try and avoid essentially getting scammed in this way. Of course, you could use third party checkers too to reduce the chance of it getting auto registered. But either way you should just snatch it up if you think you want it after doing a search from a registrar.