GroovyPost.com did a piece written by Jack Busch about his experience with an expired domain and hackers.
From the article:
I learned a hard lesson this week. Long story short, a spammer from Vietnam has hijacked my Google Apps for Domains (now called Google Apps for Business) account and is currently sending people emails from my old email address (jack@anthrocopy.com) complete with my signature, phone number and name and everything on it. Anthrocopy.com was an informal dba name I used years ago for my freelance writing business, but I slowly phased it out and let the domain expire. Now, someone else has moved into the place, hermit-crab style, and are probably contacting all my old business contacts about cheap Viagra.
I contacted Google about it and their official response was “I’m sorry to tell you that we cannot assist you with this problem since you don’t own that domain anymore.”
How Hackers Can Access Your Gmail by Buying an Expired Domain
Google Apps for Domains is different from a normal Gmail or Google Docs or Google Drive account in that it is associated with a domain that you may have registered from a company other than Google. Back in 2010, I registered Anthrocopy.com with Namecheap.com. After I wound down my freelance career to work as a fulltime technical writer, I let the domain expire. Somehow, the hacker found out that I had a Google Apps for Domain account, even though I no longer owned the domain. So, on June 20, 2014, somebody bought it through moniker.com, according to Whois.
Busch does a very good job at detailing his experience and is worth reading entirely.
Really its sad and strange way of hacking. Heard for first time. Recently my domains too expired with whom emails were associated . Thanks for posting informative article .Hope you come out of this and find appropriate solution .
Pretty crazy, I have a ton of domains (about to expire) luckily none of them are related to my business/personal work.
Hello Raymond, Thanks for sharing the informative post.
This post is lesson to all.
We should always backup and secure our data, as the online competition is increasing the misuse of data, hacking accounts or websites and other activities are increasing where we should secure our online data with correct tools and effective security strategy and process before closing down any of the accounts or domain.
Expired domains are also very attractive to web entrepreneurs. In most cases, they have a history, links, clients, articles – a lot of valuable content that could be oversold again