I would say you have pretty good standing, but from the battles I've seen (never been in any myself) these tend to get drawn out and rather nasty at times.  Might see how much of this you can do on your own, then later on you might want to get at least some legal consul on your side to help (depending on what the other side does too).  Wish you the best of luck and hopefully it won't be too difficult. 

I have to admit that if they were selling it for $99 I would just advise my friend scoop it up and avoid any hassle but on principle I feel we should fight them.

I could understand negotiating a price if the domain name was in genuine use for a website, but places like this domain cargo really chap my hide, trying to make something from nothing.

I know their site says 'fixed prices', but I don't know what that means, given the range of pricing on the domain names it is selling, I was suspecting that the price was generated by a script that calculates the popularity of the name based on hits and searches.

I will contact ICANN about their dispute process and I will report my experience however it ends up here for others.

My friend has had people tell them they tried to look up lenoxbarns on the web but couldn't find his site, so he was real interested in getting the lenoxbarns.com.

As far as lenoxbarns.net, it was available and for $10 a year per domain name it certainly wouldn't break him to have and keep both the .com and .net.

All the research I did at ICANN leads me to believe that we have a solid case based on their regulations, and the current registrar where the name was registered advertises that they adhere to ICANN regulations.

My first step in initiating a dispute was to contact a listed domain dispute resolution service, the one I saw was Verisign, they advised me to make contact with the registrar though which the name is registered.

I sent that registrar an email asking how to initiate a dispute through them, the replied by asking for the domain name in dispute.

I have sent them the domain name and all the details that I could that challenge the current registrant's rights to the name and shows they registered the name in bad faith as defined by ICANN regulations.

It is late Friday so I don't expect to hear back before Monday, I will say that their first reponse was within 2 hrs.

MrPhil:  Unless more registrars have picked up this practice, the registrar you speak of is Network Solutions(not sure if this will be filtered), when you perform a search from their website for domain name availability, they immediately register the name and offer to sell it to you.
They can do this without having to actually pay for the registration since there is a time frame of something like 30days before payment must be made, at that time, if nobody purchases it from Network Solutions, they just let it drop, and it becomes available again.
I did not read that they were charging any more than they normally charge for registration, the practice is only to snag more customers since it is losing so many to less expensive registrars.

OH, I just noticed I am a Pong!(the video game) Master. LMAO  Man that was a cool game... Am I aging myself? 

Webs of deceit.

Even after a follow up letter I still have not received any response from the registrant of the domain name in dispute.

I did do a little more digging though and found smoke and mirrors.

On the face of it, it was Domain Cargo that was selling the domain name, but the registrant is Maltuzi Holdings which might just even own the registrar Name King, I am not sure.

One thing that is for sure is that Maltuzi.com is connected to bad things in the internet world, do a search on them and their name keeps popping up in connection with scams like this.

It seems that their main activity is scooping up domain names to use for PPC advertising, and ultimately hold the domain name for ransom.

I don't know why they seem to be getting away with this for so long, it is disgusting.

Although I did turn up many results regarding Maltuzi, read this blog from 2006 for some interesting information.

This looks to have been going on for years, and I now have doubts that this company will even respond to me any more than the initial response, they have no morals whatsoever.

Now I just need to find a greedy lawyer looking for a class action suit, hey wait, did I say 'greedy lawyer'?

Isn't that like saying 'bright sun'?

This Maltuzi crap has me fuming but the worst part is, "I" don't have a beef with them, my client does, and it will be up to him to pursue this in court, it is most likely out of my hands now.

EDIT:  I sent an email to the owner of the blog I linked to above and received a reply from him that Maltuzi gave up the domain one day after sending them the letter threatening legal action, so I do have some hope, next step, talk tuff!

It looks like I missed the part where I sent Maltuzi copies of business licenses last Thursday, that was what I meant when I said I had not hear back from Maltuzi even after a follow up letter that I sent Tuesday morning asking if they received the documents via email.

Another thing is when they first responded, they said they were taking the domain of the listings of domains for sale.

They sure did, it's now one of those generic PPC sites.

Multuzi is that rare species that feeds off the underbellies of the bottom feeders.

That blog I linked to is nice, but I wanted to expose Maltuzi in places like this where there is a greater chance that it will be read by people that have been victims of Multuzi's crimes, and perhaps more people will start to stand up against them and those like them.

I do say crimes because what they do is a crime, some of it just not actually illegal yet, but a crime against society just the same, and some of what they do is blatantly illegal, just that it is a civil matter so as long as nobody does anything about it, they can just keep doing what they are doing.

Very Nice INDEED sir! 

Awesome! Congrats!