Re: ICANN verification

[Jay <mysidia () gmail com>]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2025 at 8:26 AM Marco Belmonte via NANOG
<nanog () nanog org> wrote:
> The company I work for owns a domain that was registered by an employee
> that no longer works for us and we have been unable to track them down.
> 48 hours ago the website at the domain was replaced by an ICANN
> verification message.

I would say investigate internally first to collect all details regarding
the registration.  Email based account recovery won't work if the contact
email address was on the domain in question and the domain is now disabled.
If your contacts' email addresses were in bailiwick,  then you would
likely have to
resort to making calls on the telephone to the domain registrar and provide
a PIN code answer or answer security questions method to prove your identity
as the admin or primary contact listed on the registration.

Domain management ought to never be just one employee.
Any recovery of the domain will likely be a slow and manual process if you
can't find a contact who's already an authorized admin contact on that domain or
get access to the account.

Figure out who the employee's supervisor or alt contact was if possible.

If not secure copies of the Invoices paid to the registrar, all
paperwork, records,
emails & electronic communications about the domain as essential evidence.
Then find the domain's current registrar on the  lookup.icann.org  website
try calling them and explain the situation.  Ask the registrar for all available
options of correcting the contacts.

If the domain was registered properly with your org's name and address
on the registrant field.  Then your registrar may offer an offline process
through notarized forms on the letterhead of the entity listed as registrant.

This is not the case if they used a Privacy registrant and listed Their own
info with no mention on the company as registrant name.
In that case where the registrar has no record of the domain belonging to you,
then legal process is the only really option.


If the registrar won't help, then they'd have to decide if they want to
serve the employee with legal process and   make
a UDRP dispute or legal case against the current registrant  seeking
court orders to direct a transfer on the domain.

> Marco Belmonte
--
-J