Ticketed TN Man buys Local PD Domain

They don’t mess around with domains lightly in Bluff City, Tennessee. Brian McCrary of Tennessee got a $90 ticket for speeding and when he went to the police website and saw the pending renewal notice, he floored his credit card and nabbed the domain when it dropped. The new site, online now at BluffCitypd.com, details speed trap camera information in that locale.

Talk about a speed trap on the information superhighway! McCrary got the perfect revenge. Suspecting he had been the victim of a speed trap, he initially approached the police website to complain. McCrary works for an ISP and ramped to Godaddy for a $80 pickup of the renewal status drop.

The story is attracting both domainer amusement and cynicism from Bluff City residents. Word is that until reporters started asking questions the police department didn’t even know their domain had expired. The uniques McCrary is now pulling in may top 90K. Police allege the site is merely revenge for the ticket and that aggressive ticketing has cut down on motor vehicle accidents.

Evidently the Godaddy domain expiration notification emails went to the account that had been allegedly hacked and closed or shut off. This story is a lesson to all sloppy webmasters who ignore their domaining responsibilities. In the year 2010, with the internet part of the everyday life of citizens worldwide, having a tech guy “out sick” is no excuse.

Wanted: Internet Url Police

As the Haiti relief flowed to the disaster area, scammers were registering exploitative domain names and setting up false charity websites to target well-meaning donaters. The London Daily News featured a story on the opportunistic and fraudulent nature of these scams, but experts wonder if an Internet policing authority might not be appropriate to take down sites before the public gets scammed. When you are one url away from getting fleeced, wouldn’t it be prudent to have set some domain handling controls in place?