Stephen M. Cohen

And one day someone said, hey, didn't you own that name sex.com? And I'm saying, yeah.

They go, no, this guy, Stephen Michael Cohen has it's registered under his name.

And I'm like, what? And I look it up and it was true.

It did.

And at the time, domain registrars were basically giving them away.

But Stephen Cohen, a man with a long history of fraud, recognized the immense future value of that specific digital real estate.

Right, so Cohen drafted a forged letter claiming that Kremen's company had fired Kremen, was abandoning the domain name, and was authorizing its transfer to a company controlled by Cohen.

Cohen sent this fraudulent document to Network Solutions, the entity holding the monopoly on domain registrations at the time.

It essentially justifies a forced sale for the full fair market value of the property at the time of the conversion.

Let's actually apply these rigorous rules to a wild landmark Ninth Circuit case, Kremen versus Cohen.

In nineteen ninety-four, Gary Kremen registers the highly lucrative domain name sex.com. Later on, a con man named Stephen Cohen forges a transfer letter to the domain registrar, Network Solutions, claiming Kremen's company was abandoning the domain.

Then, Network Solutions transfers the domain without even verifying the facially suspect letter.