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On a few separate occasions I have lost prominent domains to the scourge known as cyber-squatters. They've even snatched up a domain within 5 minutes of checking availability.

One domain in particular is my business DBA name. I looked to register it a couple of years ago and it was available, and within a few days it was magically taken by an Arabian person claiming to live in Kansas.

The site's an obvious parked domain, showing ads to try and rake in profit off of my company's name. Here's the kicker though...

The domain 'claims' to have been registered in 2003. Bullhockey. It was available in 2011, and no record existed. How are they able to lie about the date registered to ICANN?

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    How can you tell the person is not actually in Kansas? And how do they 'claim' to be registered in 2003? Are you suggesting the site says they're a Kansas company founded in 2003, or that you think the WHOIS data is wrong?
    – Andrew Lott
    Commented Apr 18, 2013 at 14:46
  • How did you check WHOIS? Did you query the server yourself or did you rely on 3rd party tools? 3rd party tools report domains as not registered by mistake all the time, when in fact they are registered.
    – banging
    Commented Apr 18, 2013 at 16:03
  • I used WHOIS, and as I said, they claim to be in Kansas. Never said that they were not. However, a lot of foreign names are showing on popular, English based TLDs. The WHOIS record claims 2003. It WAS available in 2011. The site's a fake - "Corporate Designs Inc" with nothing but ads. My business is B2B marketing. Doesn't take a rocket scientist.
    – Casey Hodge
    Commented Apr 18, 2013 at 17:56

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Anyone can snatch up an expiring domain and it doesn't even require being at the computer when it expires. There are many companies that you can use that you can use to snap up a expiring domain, they will hammer the registration servers in the final hours when its due to be released. These companies have request limits and actually pay for the requests, its completely legal.

If your business name is trade marked then you can gain ownership of the domain though making a trademark infringement request with the domain authority, if your business name is not trademark then its 'not your business name' but happens to be the same business name you use.

Now in terms of the domain seeming to be registered in 2003 when in fact it was re-registered in 2011 this happens if your using a whois checker which is either using cached results or using first date registered. Check other online whois checkers and you should see other results... If you don't then its possible that the domain did not fully EXPIRE... Domains have many periods before they are released back into the public. Domain registrars can auction the domain, if this is the case it could of been auctioned therefor not expired.

There is no way of faking this data..

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How are they able to lie about the date registered to ICANN?

They can't and they wont have done.

It's far more likely that whatever service you used to check whether it was available was parsing the data incorrectly, or they used some out of date cache/zone file, or the domain you are now looking at is not 100% identical to the domain you looked at then.

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