Complaint Review: eGO - Richmond North Carolina

How should I even begin this. A few years ago my husband and I purchased a small resort location in south florida. Many local surf shops and restaurants nearby are friendly with us and always refer our business. We have done fine now for 4 years and felt it was time to put up our website.

Our company name is extremely unique so being able to register our dot-com was going to be a cinch! The local businesses and us have an arrangement that we offer 15% off all business for all referrals which means we see more business come our way. Also with the promotions we do, a web site was the best way for us to do this.

We are a 50 room operation with 24/7 kitchen, pool and beach side with live entertainment and discounts to local sites, golf courses and attractions. Obviously a website for us would have helped us out alot.

Would you believe that someone already registered our domain and it points right to eGO.net and they are some rediculous website that doesn't even work properly! At this time we thought about how to proceed so I called eGO.net and waited for 20 minutes before I got to speak with anyone. After explaining who we are he offered to host my website for a startup fee of $5,000.00 PLUS $450.00 per month.

Wait if this doesn't wow you, how about a fee to design the website? I asked him if it would be possible to just have the domain name. His answer was interesting "Sorry can't do that". I asked "why not? it's not really like you need to use my hotel name to bring business to your website. Since your website doesn't point people to our business, they will eventually find us on the Internet and that is just really poor of you to not let us have it".

After that, he said "gimme $10,000.00 and it's yours, other than that, don't bother me" and he hung up. Of course I couldn't let that sit so I contacted my brother who is a ligitation attorney. He researched this matter for me and discovered quite a few interesting things. The owners of the site, Jason and Keith West are nutorious for performing something that is considered illegal, called "cyber squatting".

This means that they consume dot-com addresses knowing that the companies who will need the dot-com names will do anything for them. Their target is every hotel and resort operation they can find regardless of the size of the business. Our resort was targeted 3 years ago.

In fact, the West brothers are so good at what they do, other hotels have filed charges against them. The following 3 links are the results of the charges which were resolved with the decision of a 3rd party mediator (a real judge making an unbiased decision with no legal bindings except on the Internet):

http://www.arbforum.com/domains/decisions/190506.htm

http://arbiter.wipo.int/domains/decisions/html/2003/d2003-0341.html

http://arbiter.wipo.int/domains/decisions/html/2003/d2003-0222.html

Now as for us, we have actually merged our business with a healthclub giving us a different marketing aspect, so our name has changed a bit but it offered us the flexibility to get a new dot-com name, without anyone squatting on it.

But I would like to say to Keith and Jason West, shame on you. Fair is fair and you are certainly not fair. Big contributors to churches, making a name for yourself out of a disaster such as 9/11 and yet, you continue to try and scam small businesses out of thousands of dollars.

I hope this information was helpful to others.

Karma

pompano beach, Florida
U.S.A.