The Poker.com Mystery Remains a Mystery
So who bought Poker.com in the Moniker.com domain silent auction and how much did it go for? We know that Scores.com was sold for well over a million dollars but Poker.com was expected to fetch $10 to $20 mil according to Marc Lesnick, whose Casino Affiliate Conference in Amsterdam hosted the silent auction.
But Lesnick himself was still trying to find out who bought what could possibly be the Internet's most desired domain name.
"The silent auction would only reveal how much the domain name sold for. We would not know who purchased the domain from the silent auction," said Lesnick, who was still waiting to hear back from Moniker.com this weekend.
Lesnick admitted to getting dozens of emails this weekend regarding Poker.com's sale.
Horsetracks.com, Slots.com, Winner.com, Jackpots.com, VegasSportsbook.com were just a few of the other big domain names related to online gambling that were expected to fetch a nice dollar amount.
The term "Online Poker" has become the most searched phrase on the Web, beating out one time favorite "Online Porn".
Poker.com was a terribly mismanaged domain name from the get go when it first arrived on the scene.
Charlo Barbosa, a Vancouver, Canada, man started publicly traded Poker.com Inc. before being accused of selling online porn services via software that charged unwitting long-distance subscribers as much as $7.39 a minute. The Federal Trade Commission sued and won a settlement stopping the practice.
Other key figures in the Poker.com enterprise included Michael Jackson (no relation to the singer) who had been employed as the Chief Executive Officer and founder of Poker.com, Inc. since July 1999. Previously, Mr. Jackson ran a Real Estate Development company and acted as an Investment Banker in British Columbia.
Christa Taylor was employed as the Chief Financial Office and Secretary of
the Company beginning in November 2000. She was a frequent participant in online gambling trade shows.
In December 22, Poker.com Inc said its eponymous domain name was hijacked and traffic redirected to another business on December 6 in an act of "technological piracy".
In 1999, Poker.com Inc, then effectively a shell company with a different name, obtained the worldwide rights to poker.com until 2098, the company said in its annual report (pdf), filed March 2001. The rights were obtained from a company called UniNet Technology Inc, which in turn bought the URL from AlaCorp Inc, an unrelated company. UniNet's role in the deal was middleman - when it bought the domain name, it already agreed reselling rights to Poker.com Inc. It sold on the rights to the name to Poker.com Inc for $100,000 and a royalty of 4 per cent on gross profits per month, a far cry from the multi millions the Poker.com name was believed to have fetched this past week.
At the time of the transaction, Michael Jackson was a director of UniNet. Jackson and an associate, "Mr. Barbosa", were each rewarded with 125,000 common shares from UniNet as compensation for brokering the sale.
In a statement released at the time of the "hijacking", Mr Jackson said Poker.com Inc. is unaware of "any claim or disagreement through which the company holding the title to the domain may have reason to effect any changes to the current status and operation of www.poker.com".
But the controversy would eventually culminate into a complete mishandling of the powerful Poker.com URL.
The current reincarnation of Poker.com was launched in 2005.
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Christopher Costigan, Gambling911.com
Originally published May 13, 2007 12:39 pm ET
