[size=2][color=black][font=Arial]This week I decided that having a domain is a must and my boyfriend said that he would like to pay for it. So because I had heard only great things about godaddy.com, i thought i’d register with them. The name was misspelled first, so we had to register again the right domain as it couldn’t be replaced. In the registration my boyfriend specified that I would be the owner of the domain. Probably I should specify here that my boyfriend is in NY and I’m in Romania. Everything ok till now. That was on[/font][/color][color=black][font=Arial] Thursday. Now on Friday morning, I’ve changed the nameservers to a host that we already had and set up the email. In the evening when I got home I had received 3 e-mails from godaddy, stating that a refund was asked for and the domain was cancelled. I sent an email immediately to godaddy, asking what that was all about. When my boyfriend arrived online, he told me that he received all previous emails from godaddy, except the last ones about the refund and cancellation. It felt weird. But the domain was still working and I thought (and hoped) that it was just an error. The account on godaddy for the right name of the domain wasn’t working anymore, at least not with the password I knew and when i tried to recover the password, the email address that appeared for the account was from godaddy.com. Funny? Not quite. The next morning, seeing that I haven’t received an answer after 12 hours (as they state on their website) and seeing that the domain wasn’t up anymore, I made a call to godaddy.com After some minutes on hold, someone told me that the account was locked, but he couldn’t see why and that he’ll send a ticket to the domain department. In the afternoon I received an email from the Fraud Team in which I am told: [/font][/color]
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This account has been cancelled and all fees refunded due to suspected credit card fraud. This action was taken because the billing address provided is from and the credit card used for purchase was issued from a bank in another country.
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[color=black][font=Arial]Duh! If the owner is different from the cardholder, definitely they won’t have the same billing address, right? And if it’s weird that the cardholder is different from the owner, why do you allow us to specify a different owner in the first place?[/font][/color]
[color=black][font=Arial]Nobody called my boyfriend or his bank to see if this was a fraud. He didn’t even get that email. They just sent me an email stating it’s fraud , canceling the account and expecting me to prove it’s not a fraud. It’s the first time that I felt mistreated because of being Romanian. I know that there are lots of stupid kids from Romania that stole credit cards numbers and committed frauds over the internet. But it’s not fair to treat me the same way without even checking. Furthermore, for two days this domain was down. On Friday I have sent a few emails from the new email address, in which my portfolio had the new domain. Whoever tried to reach me or my website in these 2 days with the address I provided, wasn’t able to. I might have lost a good deal, a job…who knows.[/font][/color]
[color=black][font=Arial]After my boyfriend talked to them on the phone (they put him on hold for 10 minutes), they said they would still need 24 hours to do the checking. What was more to check? We paid for a service that they failed to provide, they didn’t notify us in the proper way, mistreated me, possibly caused me damage and they need to check what? Who would pay for all the damages caused by the domain being down? [/font][/color]
[color=black][font=Arial]The weirdest thing: the right domain was on fraud in their opinion, but the one that we registered first and misspelled wasn’t. The same data was provided for both. The misspelled domain was still up and working, we could log in to that account and I even did the cancellation.[/font][/color]
[color=black][font=Arial]So we decided to see if the domain we wanted was still available. And guess what? It was! They didn’t even reserve the domain and checking on the bank, no transfer was done on the credit cards, not to mention refunds of any kind. They didn’t do a thing. So we went to Namecheap and registered the domain again and now it’s working without any problems.[/font][/color]
[color=black][font=Arial]So I don’t know if anyone ever had problems with them before, but in Romania we got a saying “La pomul laudat sa nu te duci cu sacul”, meaning “Don’t go with a sack to the praised fruit tree.”[/font][/color][/size]