Domains Stolen Through Whois Queries

Beware of the whois service. There's a lot of people in the world spying whois queries to steal domain names.

Back in August I was looking for a cool name for my company, and the domain name was the starting point. To tell you the truth, insophia.com was not the first one at all, although I'm now convinced it was the best ;) I started with others (arguably more or less) cool names, which some bulk DNS selling company stole from me after 4 days of making my first whois query to find out if they were free. And I didn't even use any public web page for making the queries, I just used the good ol' unix command line tool.

So my advice is: if you are looking for a cool dot-com name, register all the "not so cool" domain names you find on the way, even if you are not sure at first (you never are anyway) whether you're gonna keep them. Because, when you get to decide, it may be just too late.