If I understand the article properly he threatened someone at gunpoint! That's a serious crime.
> I'm certain he's also criminally liable for the victim getting shot in the leg.
I missed that.
Yeah this article discusses an armed robbery where a firearm was discharged and someone was injured. That is a serious crime that upon conviction results in a serious sentence in any jurisdiction.
The most bizarre aspect of this is that all of this happened around Iowa State... the most minor-league podunk school in the Big Twelve (there are two lies in that name). Social media pornographers should aim higher than that.
Without excusing the article for confusing several people and requiring follow up research to answer an obviously related question, in my experience if someone dies it will almost-always be explicitly stated in the article; newspapers are far more like to remember to say "shot and killed" or "shot... killing him instantly" or "died of his injuries", and far more likely to cut a sentence about an auxiliary party's recovery when editing.
It is clear that the victim survived his gunshots but Hopkins' fate is not mentioned in the press release linked. It turns out he did survive and got a 20 year sentence.
I thought the same until I read the article. The headline is pretty crap tbh. It wasn't a normal domain hijacking, he sent in an armed accomplice who pointed his gun at the victims head and threatened to kill him if he didn't transfer it. The victim was injured during a struggle and the accomplice was shot dead.
I think they switched articles. It was there when I read it the first time. It's not the same article when I go back to the link. Something definitely changed.
Conspiracy gets you the same amount of time as the perpetrator. Gun escalation adds at minimum 5 more years. Concurrently, this sounds about right.
Of course this guy is an idiot. The victim bought the domain around the same time he started his “brand” so he may have been squatting. File a trademark and be done with it.
Considering he used it for legitimate purposes (according to the article) that would likely be a mute point, especially if the did not operate in the same entrepreneurial space.
It sounds like he was using it to promote concerts which seems similar enough to how the main "do it for state" guy was using it to promote parties in the same town. He likely could have gotten it from a trademark suit but was probably too dumb to realize that.
The guy was not bright. Someone orders you at gunpoint to transfer your domain name... you do it. Less risk of dying and the ICANN dispute resolution is going to be really straightforward.
The article says he was pistol whipped multiple times even though he was complying with the gunman. He saw an opportunity and took it, and it's totally unfair to criticize his actions in such a high pressure situation from the comfort of your keyboard.
I've never faced a gun, so take my words with a grain of salt here: I thought the old ...advice... was if the attacker has a gun, you charge—if they attacker has a knife, you run. I'm sure that carries some qualifiers, though...
It's a pretty wild story for being about a website domain name.
I have been fired on twice (I live in FL it comes with the territory of being a Florida Man)
TLDR; in a 10ftx10ft room I want a knife.
Yes a gun is not a reactionary weapon you have to pull the trigger, it takes time to process that the victim has now moved to being the attacker and usually if you are within arms reach it is too late for the original attacker to react and pull off the shot before he has lost at least total control of the gun. This is why cops maintain distance when they have someone at gunpoint.
Conversely a knife is a reactionary weapon if you jump at me and I flinch you get cut. Not a whole lot of ways to disarm a knife unless the attacker is actively attacking with it, thus exposing his arm.
This is why 9 times out of 10 in a fight between a person with a gun and a person with a knife, at striking distance, the person with the gun will fair far worse than the person with the knife. The person with the gun has to reorient and shoot again, the person with the knife just has to flail. Knife also leave more damaging wounds when used as a penetrating weapon and have more chance of hitting vitals or an artery.
Here is a great training video of how effective a knife is against someone armed with a gun:
The advice is generally fine though it neglects the option of compliance. Some random person trying to rob you might be perfectly happy taking your wallet/car/whatever and running away. If they wanted to shoot you they could just do that first and take what they want anyways.
Have been mugged at gun point in CA, didn't resist and gave them what they wanted. I no longer live in the the awful US, so I don't have to worry about these things anymore. Despite what the media say, Hong Kong is far safer!
As the self-defence crowd like to say, "compliance does not guarantee safety".
The attacker in this case:
* Was not just threatening the victim, but physically attacking him even as he complied with the attacker's instructions.
* Was committing a serious felony for which he would be facing a long long prison sentence even if he left the victim alive (as demonstrated here!), meaning the rational self-interested course of action would be to execute the victim after getting what he wanted, to stop him from identifying the attacker.
Whether or not I'd have the courage and presence of mind to do it myself in the victim's place, resisting in this case seems to me like exactly the correct thing to have done, and I suspect it saved the victim's life.
Apparently, Hopkins became increasingly violent when asked for a mailing address and email for the new domain owner. He pistol-whipped the victim, tased him then cocked the pistol.
Given that victim was going to end up knowing who was robbing him, he likely assumed he'd be killed after the transfer.
the guy being held at gunpoint knew that it would take 3 business days for the domain to transfer and didn't want to risk being held at gunpoint (or not) for that long
I was also shocked. If only the Department of Justice could do, uh, justice to the story with some decent writing... this was way more engrossing than I thought it would be.
This is a PR article and not intended to be news. This is an ad for:
> This case was brought as part of Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN). PSN is the centerpiece of the Department of Justice’s violent crime reduction efforts.
I'm curious how he thought he would get away with it. If the plan was successful, he'd control the domain name, which seems like pretty damning evidence.
If he'd survived.
If say he'd been killed after the transfer, I'm not sure Police would have checked to see if the victim had made any domain name transfers prior to the home invasion.
Would you (or anyone with even half a brain) risk a murder conviction on the basis of "I'm not sure police would check"? Especially considering there wouldn't have been any obvious motive for the killing which would make them investigate further.
Not to mention, owning the domain is a permanent record, so even if they don't check it immediately, the evidence can always resurface years later.
>No one with half a brain would risk an assault conviction for a bloody domain name transfer.
I might! Provided the domain was something like blockchain.info, myetherwallet.com or some other domain that you could easily use to steal hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency.
Although, if there's a serious risk of an assault conviction then the plan probably just isn't very good.
> I might! Provided the domain was something like blockchain.info, myetherwallet.com or some other domain that you could easily use to steal hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency.
Just go with a vanity domain and just skip the assault charges. Go with blockchain.christmas or blockchain.website. Problem solved!
Given they were threatening the domain owner’s friends, even basic police work would’ve quickly turned it up. Even without police work I’m sure friends or family would’ve volunteered the info.
Yeah, I don't think it was the plotting that got him 14 years, it was:
> Hopkins put the firearm against the victim’s head and ordered him to follow the directions on the demand note. Hopkins then pistol whipped the victim several times in the head.
The title intentionally makes it sound like the 14 years is an overreaction, so that your reaction is "wtf" and you click on the link. It also buries the fact that the victim managed to wrestle the gun away and kill his attacker (who was the cousin of the man sentenced to 14 years in prison).
So yeah, he wasn't sentenced to 14 years for stealing a domain; he was sentenced to 14 years for concocting a criminal scheme that got his cousin killed. Which isn't quite as juicy as the mental image of some Instagram bro kidnapping and shooting some rando (the victim was shot in the leg during the struggle).
His felony conviction was over perjury. Unless he's had some other violent past, I highly doubt most people would consider the death penalty appropriate (I don't think that's appropriate here).
> Hopkins was a convicted felon as the result of a 2006 conviction for perjury in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Iowa.
The point isn't that the crime he committed, for which he was sentenced to 20 years, wasn't heinous; the point is that "convicted felon" is not legal short-hand for "historically violent offender". In this particular case, he had previously be convicted of "felony perjury". You can also be convicted, for instance, of "felony vandalism".
Whether or not I agree with the argument, it's not like totally crazy to argue that someone should be sentenced to death for murder or attempted murder, and also not like super crazy to argue that if you're considering the death penalty then a history of violent behavior might be relevant. It is totally bonkers-town to say that because someone committed, say, felony vandalism (having caused $550 of property damage with their graffiti) as opposed to misdemeanor vandalism (having only caused $450 of damage), that should be the deciding factor in whether or not to later put them to death for another crime.
Convicted felon just doesn't mean what people think it does.
The very fact that this person was willing to commit a crime makes your argument irrelevant. No one has stated this person should get a death penalty for vandalism.
No one. And poo on you for trying to argue such.
I suppose we should wait until this individual attempts to kill atleast 4 people before they qualify for the death penalty? 10? 2? 100? How many does it take before they're considered violent and dangerous?
Personal attacks aren't ok here, regardless of what someone else posted. Also, please don't break the site guidelines by replying to egregious comments. As you'll see if you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, they ask you to flag them instead. Had you done so, the comment would probably have been killed.
This is so mind boggling and sad... It was over a pretty average domain name (doitforstate.com) and there's no way those guys would have gotten away with it even if the victim had been silenced.
People do get very emotionally involved with domain names. I bought an expired domain some time ago for something like $200. The previous owner had apparently not intended for it to expire. I didn't know that until he contacted me.
I was sympathetic, so I told him what I paid, and offered to sell it back for $200 + $100 for my effort to start over, migrate stuff, etc.
I got a tirade of cursing and accusations back for my trouble.
Wow, some people are quite something, acting like whole universe revolves around them. I guess I would respond (in rather forced) polite manner that you are disappointed by his reaction, that he should take steps to have more control of his emotions for his own good, that because of his insults you are hereby stopping any other communication with him, unless he offers 100x more as compensation for his hurtful actions.
We all can do our little to teach a-holes of this world a lesson or two in good manners. Nothing crazy or vengeful, but something they can and should take as a lesson to become better human beings. Or suffer, their choice. Even most broken people usually understand that kind of basic logic.
How sure are you it wasn't an attempted scam? For some reason scammers seem to get really abusive like that.
Totally a tangent, but I was once at a time share presentation (I was a stupid kid and they got me in with some free cash or something) and they wanted about $30K for this timeshare which definitely wasn't worth $30K. Hell, the house I was living in ALL the weeks of a year was only about $100K. When I was like, "I can't afford that" they started talking to me about how this $30K timeshare was a great investment. I responded like, "If I had $30K to invest, there are better things to invest in that don't cost me hundreds per year in management fees." The guy brought over his boss who screamed in my face, basically telling me I'm too stupid to invest $30K and I'm wasting his time. I looked around, and everyone was looking at him. I thought to myself, "Dude, you just nuked every possible sale in this room for a sale that was never going to happen."
FWIW, I find trying to educate assholes is more trouble than its worth, since it rarely accomplishes something. Merely ignoring them is easier, more pleasant, and still an opportunity to learn when they start asking "why doesn't anybody return my calls"
$300 is a very reasonable amount for something that sounds like it could have fetched maybe 5-10x that on reseller forums. But I could also see how he views you as some sort of predatory opportunist trying to make a quick buck.
Maybe, but any term besides influencer feels better as it doesn't give this thug some kind of credit for being a pseudo celebrity. Call him an internet vlogger if you must.
Registering a .com with a simple additional word such as "doitforstatedudes" and then spamming Google would have gotten him to page 1. Black hat SEO works.
Blackhat SEO methods from 5+ years ago may not work anymore, but it's a cat/mouse game, so there are certainly modern methods that work like a charm until Google catches up again.
It's like adblocking. 5+ years ago it was generally enough to target HTML elements with an ID of "advertising-wrapper" or something obvious like that. But ad networks and the sites that implement them got smart and started using generic or randomized IDs so that would work. Then the new method was blocking known advertising domains. Now some of them are starting to serve ads from the same domain you access the site through.
I was attending Iowa State Universiry when the "Do it for State" thing kicked off. I never looked it up myself, but I heard the occasional reference to it around campus so it must have been somewhat popular.
A relative of mine who works as an administrator at ISU also complained about it at the time. It's not a great thing to have associated with your school, although there isn't much they could do about it.
I thought it was a one-off thing. Now I'm just glad I never needed to associate with that guy.
In answer to the obvious question: How did he think he would get away with this? What was his end game? The only answers are (1) people don't commit crimes unless they think they will get away with it - everyone in prison had a plan for avoiding prosecution, and (2) There are some really really stupid people in the world who simply can't see or project beyond one or two steps. This may be because of drug use or environmental conditions (lead paint), or because they just aren't super bright. The world is safer with him in prison.
Party focused social media site, college kids, and a homeless felon that went full Raising Arizona with pantyhose on his head before being disarmed and shot with his own gun
Probably a combination of drugs and stupidity, though I'm not sure which element was more influential.
I know plenty of people who have been to jail and or prison. Most said they gave zero thought to concequences. Be it rage, addiction, or opprotunity, the usual impetus for the crime that gets caught is usually ill-considered at best. Not expecting to get caught is very distinct from expecting not to get caught.
I wanted a specific domain name of a deceased loved one. I approached the domain parker and asked what they wanted for it. He wanted 200k and escrow. I offered $50. He took my $50.
I ran into a small community of domain squatters or speculators or whatever you want to call folks who buy them up purely in order to sell them at a profit.
The level of amateurism / folks just looking for a quick couple dollars was pretty high and what they asked for / got, even based on their own stories, was all over the map.
Many of them didn't care about what they initially ask for even at the risk of scaring off a sale. A lot seemed to be kids or folks with limited resources playing it as a game for fun / in the hopes of striking it rich.
It's largely a game or done for the novelty value, I think, for many of them - kind of like buying a certificate that says you named a star or an asteroid.
I ran across one that had my name as a .com (something I'd obviously want), had a bunch of back and forth for several years, once or twice every year, and eventually they realized - ya know - nobody with this name is ever going to pay the exorbitant price they wanted, then they let it lapse. Picked it up for $10 or so, instead of $15,000+.
Some of the very short domain names that map to abbreviated company names in China can still be valuable, or if they're somehow truly unique, but for the most part, domain squatting is a dead end for 99% of the domain names at anything less than a very large scale.
You only need predict one startup or celebrity name right and you can do all the squatting your cold evil heart desires for the next 20 years. Everything after that is pure profit. Domain names are cheap and companies are rich. It's not that unlikely.
I've been looking for a new domain since my main one is really hard to tell people in person, and I'm annoyed at having to spell it out every time.
So, the TLD .family was coming to the public, and I kept my eye on it. I wanted <my last name>.family. I learned a lot about TLDs during this time (which I've now forgotten). There is some kind of pre-buy period where you can buy domains before anyone else at an increased price. It was too much for me though, so I waited for the public release.
Then it went public, but, my last name was marked as premium for $1000/year. I felt this wasn't fair, as I can't control my birth name! So I emailed the company in control of the domain, and they got back with me with a deal. $1000 one time payment and $20/year thereafter. Still too rich for my blood...
> Determining that is not hard at all. Is there a big buy button and a million ads on the front page? Then it's not being used. Done.
It is easy to detect the egregious cases like you describe.
But, not all cases are so egregious. I might have no website on the domain, yet still be using it for email. Or, I might be hosting some sort of intranet on the domain and all the public can see is a login page, with no idea of what content lies beyond it. Or, I might not be using the domain at all, and just waiting for someone to contact me with an offer to buy it. I might even hook it up with email that I never really use (but which redirects to my actual email), and a login page with nothing behind it, in order to make it look like I am really using it. How to distinguish these cases?
That is very obviously not the reason. The reason is that tech startups are swimming in money and seem to like the sound of .io domains. Same with .tech and .ai.
Probably because they wouldn't have been able to prove intent to murder? If the victim had actually been killed, "Polo" probably would have been charged under the felony murder rule.
What an idiot. If he had money, he should have just paid some lawyers. Trademark the phrase “Do It For State” then strong-arm control of the domain via an IP infringement claim.
It’s sad but with enough money, a good legal team could almost certainly win it back. Most likely when the holder realized a modest payout was cheaper than their own legal fees to defend it.
156 comments
[ 5.9 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadA lot of violent rapes get less of a sentence.
> I'm certain he's also criminally liable for the victim getting shot in the leg.
I missed that.
Yeah this article discusses an armed robbery where a firearm was discharged and someone was injured. That is a serious crime that upon conviction results in a serious sentence in any jurisdiction.
It's a violent crime with a lot of premeditation.
> The victim shot Hopkins multiple times in the chest. He then contacted law enforcement.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndia/pr/cedar-rapids-felon-sent...
1. Steal something from a store. 2. Bring a gun. 3. Show it. 4. Discharge it. 5. Injure someone. 6. Kill someone.
Each of these things make your punishment much harsher, even if your initial thing was to just steal a chocolate bar (1).
Of course this guy is an idiot. The victim bought the domain around the same time he started his “brand” so he may have been squatting. File a trademark and be done with it.
It's a pretty wild story for being about a website domain name.
TLDR; in a 10ftx10ft room I want a knife.
Yes a gun is not a reactionary weapon you have to pull the trigger, it takes time to process that the victim has now moved to being the attacker and usually if you are within arms reach it is too late for the original attacker to react and pull off the shot before he has lost at least total control of the gun. This is why cops maintain distance when they have someone at gunpoint.
Conversely a knife is a reactionary weapon if you jump at me and I flinch you get cut. Not a whole lot of ways to disarm a knife unless the attacker is actively attacking with it, thus exposing his arm.
This is why 9 times out of 10 in a fight between a person with a gun and a person with a knife, at striking distance, the person with the gun will fair far worse than the person with the knife. The person with the gun has to reorient and shoot again, the person with the knife just has to flail. Knife also leave more damaging wounds when used as a penetrating weapon and have more chance of hitting vitals or an artery.
Here is a great training video of how effective a knife is against someone armed with a gun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbnSTW7Ar44
The attacker in this case:
* Was not just threatening the victim, but physically attacking him even as he complied with the attacker's instructions.
* Was committing a serious felony for which he would be facing a long long prison sentence even if he left the victim alive (as demonstrated here!), meaning the rational self-interested course of action would be to execute the victim after getting what he wanted, to stop him from identifying the attacker.
Whether or not I'd have the courage and presence of mind to do it myself in the victim's place, resisting in this case seems to me like exactly the correct thing to have done, and I suspect it saved the victim's life.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This isn't a junkie wanting your wallet. This is someone forcibly entering your home with weapons and assaulting you.
You have to assume that once you have given up the thing he wants, you remaining alive isn't high on his list of priorities.
The victim lived. He did the right thing.
I'm also impressed by the fact that the victim shot the attacker several times in the chest yet the attacker survived.
It was the attacker's cousin (who enlisted him to to perform the attack) that was sentenced.
Edit: a comment below mentions that the attacker indeed survived and was sentenced to 20 years: https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/public-safety/cedar-...
It's weird that the Department of Justice's article doesn't mention that...
> This case was brought as part of Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN). PSN is the centerpiece of the Department of Justice’s violent crime reduction efforts.
Not to mention, owning the domain is a permanent record, so even if they don't check it immediately, the evidence can always resurface years later.
No one with half a brain would risk an assault conviction for a bloody domain name transfer.
But here we are, dumbfounded as we can possibly be.
I might! Provided the domain was something like blockchain.info, myetherwallet.com or some other domain that you could easily use to steal hundreds of millions in cryptocurrency.
Although, if there's a serious risk of an assault conviction then the plan probably just isn't very good.
Just go with a vanity domain and just skip the assault charges. Go with blockchain.christmas or blockchain.website. Problem solved!
The entire situation is a hypothetical, so the only thing you can operate with is assumptions.
I think it'd be an easy case. I'm just glad it didn't come to that and the domain owner is alive and well, all things considered.
Most people reading the title are going to think this is about some computer tomfoolery, not violence.
> Hopkins put the firearm against the victim’s head and ordered him to follow the directions on the demand note. Hopkins then pistol whipped the victim several times in the head.
So yeah, he wasn't sentenced to 14 years for stealing a domain; he was sentenced to 14 years for concocting a criminal scheme that got his cousin killed. Which isn't quite as juicy as the mental image of some Instagram bro kidnapping and shooting some rando (the victim was shot in the leg during the struggle).
[1]https://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/public-safety/cedar-...
I know this is going to be controversial, but I have only two words to say to that: death penalty.
> Hopkins was a convicted felon as the result of a 2006 conviction for perjury in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Iowa.
> https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndia/pr/cedar-rapids-felon-sent...
Whether or not I agree with the argument, it's not like totally crazy to argue that someone should be sentenced to death for murder or attempted murder, and also not like super crazy to argue that if you're considering the death penalty then a history of violent behavior might be relevant. It is totally bonkers-town to say that because someone committed, say, felony vandalism (having caused $550 of property damage with their graffiti) as opposed to misdemeanor vandalism (having only caused $450 of damage), that should be the deciding factor in whether or not to later put them to death for another crime.
Convicted felon just doesn't mean what people think it does.
No one. And poo on you for trying to argue such.
I suppose we should wait until this individual attempts to kill atleast 4 people before they qualify for the death penalty? 10? 2? 100? How many does it take before they're considered violent and dangerous?
That is exactly what was being argued.
Governments and militaries do every day. The people are allowed to participate in that process (in favor or against!), even if it you don't like it.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndia/pr/cedar-rapids-felon-sent...
He entered into a plea agreement so it's a safe assumption he cooperated to convict Adams. Also, that's 20 years in Federal prison - no parole.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"A man who enlisted his cousin to break into a Cedar Rapids man’s home and order him at gunpoint to transfer an Internet domain"
If this was just phising attack from phone and keyboard it would be slap on wrist
I was sympathetic, so I told him what I paid, and offered to sell it back for $200 + $100 for my effort to start over, migrate stuff, etc.
I got a tirade of cursing and accusations back for my trouble.
We all can do our little to teach a-holes of this world a lesson or two in good manners. Nothing crazy or vengeful, but something they can and should take as a lesson to become better human beings. Or suffer, their choice. Even most broken people usually understand that kind of basic logic.
Totally a tangent, but I was once at a time share presentation (I was a stupid kid and they got me in with some free cash or something) and they wanted about $30K for this timeshare which definitely wasn't worth $30K. Hell, the house I was living in ALL the weeks of a year was only about $100K. When I was like, "I can't afford that" they started talking to me about how this $30K timeshare was a great investment. I responded like, "If I had $30K to invest, there are better things to invest in that don't cost me hundreds per year in management fees." The guy brought over his boss who screamed in my face, basically telling me I'm too stupid to invest $30K and I'm wasting his time. I looked around, and everyone was looking at him. I thought to myself, "Dude, you just nuked every possible sale in this room for a sale that was never going to happen."
Yeah, the gall of some people!
> unless he offers 100x more as compensation for his hurtful actions.
Uh, wait
hu? like buying a ton of paid links?
It's like adblocking. 5+ years ago it was generally enough to target HTML elements with an ID of "advertising-wrapper" or something obvious like that. But ad networks and the sites that implement them got smart and started using generic or randomized IDs so that would work. Then the new method was blocking known advertising domains. Now some of them are starting to serve ads from the same domain you access the site through.
A relative of mine who works as an administrator at ISU also complained about it at the time. It's not a great thing to have associated with your school, although there isn't much they could do about it.
I thought it was a one-off thing. Now I'm just glad I never needed to associate with that guy.
Probably a combination of drugs and stupidity, though I'm not sure which element was more influential.
The level of amateurism / folks just looking for a quick couple dollars was pretty high and what they asked for / got, even based on their own stories, was all over the map.
Many of them didn't care about what they initially ask for even at the risk of scaring off a sale. A lot seemed to be kids or folks with limited resources playing it as a game for fun / in the hopes of striking it rich.
I ran across one that had my name as a .com (something I'd obviously want), had a bunch of back and forth for several years, once or twice every year, and eventually they realized - ya know - nobody with this name is ever going to pay the exorbitant price they wanted, then they let it lapse. Picked it up for $10 or so, instead of $15,000+.
Some of the very short domain names that map to abbreviated company names in China can still be valuable, or if they're somehow truly unique, but for the most part, domain squatting is a dead end for 99% of the domain names at anything less than a very large scale.
So, the TLD .family was coming to the public, and I kept my eye on it. I wanted <my last name>.family. I learned a lot about TLDs during this time (which I've now forgotten). There is some kind of pre-buy period where you can buy domains before anyone else at an increased price. It was too much for me though, so I waited for the public release.
Then it went public, but, my last name was marked as premium for $1000/year. I felt this wasn't fair, as I can't control my birth name! So I emailed the company in control of the domain, and they got back with me with a deal. $1000 one time payment and $20/year thereafter. Still too rich for my blood...
Of course, determining whether a domain is really in use or not is hard, and whatever criteria are adopted, squatters will try to game them.
But of course, ICANN and registars make way too much money from these people to do anything about it. Isn't capitalism just wonderful?
It is easy to detect the egregious cases like you describe.
But, not all cases are so egregious. I might have no website on the domain, yet still be using it for email. Or, I might be hosting some sort of intranet on the domain and all the public can see is a login page, with no idea of what content lies beyond it. Or, I might not be using the domain at all, and just waiting for someone to contact me with an offer to buy it. I might even hook it up with email that I never really use (but which redirects to my actual email), and a login page with nothing behind it, in order to make it look like I am really using it. How to distinguish these cases?
[1] https://onezero.medium.com/the-influencer-and-the-hit-man-6c...
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21751920