Fax Chronicle

This is a fantastic story and it gives me great pleasure to be able to post it, since it has a significant fax component to it, that is in fact a myth.  Interesting to say the least. Beyond that there are some interesting legal ramifications as well as a human story of revenge, con artists, porn, and more.

BACK in 1994, Internet entrepreneur Gary Kremen had what seemed like a good idea: register the domain name sex.com. That was before the name was stolen by a crook named Stephen Cohen, before Kremen spent 12 years in and out of courts getting the name back and winning judgments against Cohen, before Kremen became a speed freak from the stress of the affair, before Cohen skipped court and the country and dumped his millions in Mexican shrimp farms and strip clubs, before …

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Even the story of how Cohen stole the domain from Kremen is shrouded in mystery. For years it was reported—even by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—that he forged a fax from Kremen’s company to convince domain registrar Network Solutions to transfer sex.com to Cohen. But McCarthy, says, that was just a coverup. First, Cohen—fresh out of jail for impersonating a bankruptcy lawyer—filled out an online form deleting Kremen as the contact and transferring the registration to himself.

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“Then, because he’s incredibly persuasive, Cohen called up and persuaded whoever was on the other end of the line that the change was legit. So they put the change through. Then, afterwards, he wrote this fax as an elaborate smokescreen. For years afterward people thought it was the fax that had done it. In actual fact, he had found a very clever way to get ahold of the domain, and created the fax as a smokescreen after the fact. And it took years to figure out.”

The coverup fax purported to be a letter from Kremen’s company to Cohen, explaining that Kremen had left the company and would Cohen please take this horrible domain name off their hands. Despite the fact that Kremen’s company was called Online Classifieds, the fax stated: “Because we do not have a direct connection to the Internet, we request that you notify the Internet registration on our behalf, to delete our domain name sex.com. Further, we have no objections to your use of the domain name sex.com and this letter shall serve as our authorization to the Internet registration to transfer sex.com to your corporation.”

Source: News & Culture in San Jose, CA | Sex.com