Man Makes $250k On Domain Name

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This is why domain names are great collateral on personal loans you make to your friends. Wait. What?

It began with a bad loan to a billiards player. Eight years ago, DiGirolamo handed $15,000 to a friend he met while shooting pool. DiGirolamo did not charge any interest, and the friend promised to repay the loan in 60 days.
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Hey. People win the lottery too.

Glad he actually made something off the domain.
 
45 seems easy to remember. if the site becomes a hit it can make it money back. However the website looks like just another yahoo clone
 
You can't even attempt to buy < 3 character domain names these days it seems. Although Paypal was able to purchase x.com somehow.
 
Wow, 45.com brought in all that $? You know the IRS will expect this guy to pay his "fair share" of taxes. :eek:
 
Sgraffite said:
You can't even attempt to buy < 3 character domain names these days it seems. Although Paypal was able to purchase x.com somehow.
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Paypal was a 1999 merger between X.com (an internet bank), and Confinity, a Palm Pilot payment company. So basically, they've had it for a long time; x.com has been registered since 1993 though; so X.com must have bought it from somebody.
 
it's pretty incredible how much stock people put in a web address. Yeah if one is catchy and easy to remember that might bring a bunch of folks to your site. However if your sight sucks balls then pretty much no one is going to be a repeat visitor.

On a related note, what's up with companies that have the three letter top level domain in their official name?
 
Ummm.....doesn't he have to pay the excess back to the guy he loaned money to. I mean, aren't there clear laws about what you can do with collateral on a loan. I feel like I should remember more considering that I just took a class on commercial law (basically the whole course was about loans and collateral). I he was supposed to deduct what he was owed, any costs of selling the collateral, then pay the rest back to the borrower.
 
Anyway, the short of it is that he had better hope that the guy he loaned money to doesn't see this story.
 
Boozer said:
Why? It's his now.
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That's the thing though. I believe that unless their agreement was that the guy could keep the collateral if the loan was not repaid, the secured party (the guy who loaned the money) has to dispose of the collateral (not just hold on to it for years and use it for himself) and pay any excess money back to the debtor. I think the only way that he could actually keep all of this money is if he showed that he was owed $200k+ interest on the 15k loan. Of course, he would probably have to explain why he held on to the collateral for so many years instead of just disposing of it. I think generally the only way to get the collateral yourself is to sell it at auction and then bid on it yourself. The only exception that I can think of are pawn shops, but those are highly highly regulated.
 
Imagine it in this context. You get a loan to buy a house and you give a mortgage to the mortgage company. The house is worth 50k, the loan is worth 50k, you pay 40k to the mortgage company, still owe 10k, but can't make your payments and they foreclose. They sell the house for 50k at auction. They don't get to keep all 50k. They can take the 10k they are still owed, subtract any costs they incurred in disposing of the property, and the rest must be returned to you. They can't just foreclose, live in it, play around with it, then sell it and keep all the money.
 
The short of it is that there are a ton of factors, and it varies depending on state law, but if I was the guy who got this windfall I would shut up about it and hope that neither the debtor nor any other creditors that he has read that story.
 
JapaneseGorilla said:
That's the thing though. I believe that unless their agreement was that the guy could keep the collateral if the loan was not repaid, the secured party (the guy who loaned the money) has to dispose of the collateral (not just hold on to it for years and use it for himself) and pay any excess money back to the debtor. I think the only way that he could actually keep all of this money is if he showed that he was owed $200k+ interest on the 15k loan. Of course, he would probably have to explain why he held on to the collateral for so many years instead of just disposing of it. I think generally the only way to get the collateral yourself is to sell it at auction and then bid on it yourself. The only exception that I can think of are pawn shops, but those are highly highly regulated.
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They had a verbal agreement to repay the loan in full within 60 days.....and I'm sure his story will fill in the blanks wherever needed. It would be one story against another.

/Collateral forfeited.
 
I knew the original owner (Ehud) of wallstreet.com here in Tucson in the mid 90's. He sold it for a cool 1mill. The guy was a jerk irl, but he was smart.
 
IMO it should be illegal to sit on domain names regardless.

I allowed mine on my old site to expire, and by the time I noticed, someone had already purchased it and has been sitting on it for the last decade unused.

A limit of say 10 domain names per person would go along way to curb this.
 
JapaneseGorilla said:
Ummm.....doesn't he have to pay the excess back to the guy he loaned money to. I mean, aren't there clear laws about what you can do with collateral on a loan. I feel like I should remember more considering that I just took a class on commercial law (basically the whole course was about loans and collateral). I he was supposed to deduct what he was owed, any costs of selling the collateral, then pay the rest back to the borrower.
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Nope. Not if it was setup in a fashion like "pawns." It's pure profit on a default. Somewhat along the lines of a home that you have made payments on and default on.
 
JapaneseGorilla said:
Imagine it in this context. You get a loan to buy a house and you give a mortgage to the mortgage company. The house is worth 50k, the loan is worth 50k, you pay 40k to the mortgage company, still owe 10k, but can't make your payments and they foreclose. They sell the house for 50k at auction. They don't get to keep all 50k. They can take the 10k they are still owed, subtract any costs they incurred in disposing of the property, and the rest must be returned to you. They can't just foreclose, live in it, play around with it, then sell it and keep all the money.
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This is interesting because I am totally unaware of this. It seems to me banks will foreclose on people who are not under water all the time.

Of course it would be easy enough to manipulate any part of the transaction. The bank can simply say they paid huge fees by using funny math to sell the property. Also many houses do sit on the market for years. In this case one part made 30K just in transaction fees.
 
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