Unsuccesful attempt

I was waiting for a domain to become available since April 13th (when it expired). On May 15 it was marked for deletion by the original registrar. After 30 days in redemption period, its deletion was pending for 5 additional days, so it was supposed to become available on the 21st of June.

My mistake (at least the worst mistake, I think,) was to trust the who.is website. It seemed to provide finer grained information about the status of the domain than other whois web-based providers, but was a bit outdated.

So, who.is was still showing the target domain as pending deletion on the 21st of this month, which then seemed suspicious to me. I checked it out on whois.net and discovered that an opportunistic domain registrar cyber-squattered the domain. In fact, the site eacosta.com (the link is wrong on purpose) is up since that very same day, showing very bad taste advertising that is nor related to me, nor any other acronym. So please, don't visit it, since its purpose is cast into doubt.

I was a bit disappointed after waiting for so long, but there may be nothing I could have done to avoid it after all (these guys are professionals,) so it is not something I should really worry about. What upsets me is not the fact that someone else bought the domain before I had a chance, but that it was someone who doesn't have a legitimate interest in the domain name.

I wrote this post with the explicit purpose of helping to create awareness of this kind of practices.