“Who is the real Fred Williams?” Unfortunately, this is not the title of a novel, this is a citation from UDPR Case No. D2024-2516 Quickware, Inc. / Williams Fred v. Quickware.

It involves the valuable two letter domain “qw.com”. Reading the decision once will not suffice to  understand the factual background of the case. A summary.

The case involves a hacker group filing an UDRP complaint with WIPO on June 17, 2024. They seem to have impersonated the domain registrant in order to gain control over the domain furnishing (almost) correct names and documents but with a fraudulent email address which they controlled.

However, after the legitimate question of ‘who is the real Fred Williams?’ was asked, the following has been found:

“[..] The Respondent Quickware furnishes correspondence with the Registrar dating from May 2024, showing that the Registrar had received repeated requests to change the password or email associated with the disputed domain name. The Respondent also received an email from the same gmail account cited in connection with the supposed “hacker” named in the Complaint, announcing a hack and demanding payment of USD 20,000 in Bitcoin (as in the “hacker” email quoted in the Complaint in this proceeding). And of course, the actual person involved in the Quickware company went by the name Fred Williams, not “Williams Fred” as the Complainant called him, a mistake that accords with the English spelling and grammar errors found throughout the Complaint. The really telling error, of course, is that the Complaint purports to be grounded on a trademark registration for QUICKWARE as a word mark, United States Trademark Registration No. 146199, registered on September 8, 1987 (long before Quickware, Inc. came into existence). But this trademark is registered to an unrelated company, Quickware Engineering & Design LLC of Waltham, Massachusetts, United States, and has nothing to do with Quickware Inc.

On the available record, the Panel finds that;

• there is no current, relevant legal entity known as Quickware, Inc.;
• the disputed domain name, comprising an inherently valuable, two-character string, is registered to ”Quickware”, which is now a fictitious name or alter ego of Fred Williams that is used for an apparently longestablished information technology business;
• the unknown Complainant in this proceeding is not Fred Williams nor a legal entity known as “Quickware”; and
• the unknown Complainant in this proceeding is not the owner of a relevant trademark.”

So in this case, the fraudulent nature of the proceeding was discovered because of a trivial grammar mistake:  ‘Williams Fred’ was used instead of ‘Fred Williams’, and a trademark registration owned by an unrelated company was cited by the Complainant.

What if the hacker’s group would have not made these errors, they would have gained control over a valuable domain name by following the regular pathway of legitimate owners.
Case No. D2024-2516, is available here.