A northern New Jersey man is charged with stealing a prime piece of Internet real estate and reselling it to basketball player Mark Madsen in one of the nation’s first prosecutions of a suspected domain name thief.
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Daniel Goncalves, 25, of Union, hacked into an online account belonging to one of the owners of the P2P.com domain name, New Jersey State Police said Monday. He allegedly shifted ownership to himself and resold the Web site address on eBay to Madsen, a Los Angeles Clippers forward who did not know the name was stolen.
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Goncalves, who works for an online research firm, was arrested Thursday on felony charges of theft by unlawful taking or deception, identity theft and computer theft. Julian Castellanos, a state police spokesman, said each of the three counts carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. Goncalves, who did not respond to a reporter’s phone calls, is free after posting a $60,000 cash bail.
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Jeremiah Johnston, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Internet Commerce Association, said the criminal prosecution is the first of its kind and should serve as a wake-up call for other law enforcement agencies.
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They’re usually a few years behind new technology trends, Johnston said. That’s frustrating when you have domain names selling for seven figures.
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The State Police estimate the true worth of P2P.com at up to $200,000 because of its relation to the peer-to-peer, or P2P, file-sharing phenomenon.
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Domain names are the addresses used by computers to find Web sites and route e-mail.
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Hundreds of registration companies, such as Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Go Daddy Group, sell them for typically less than $10 apiece. Entrepreneurs, meanwhile, make their living off buying and selling easy-to-remember names like P2P.
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Marc Ostrofsky, one of the legitimate owners of P2P.com, estimates that the ownership group spent 30 months and $500,000 trying to reclaim the domain name. They have…