A client had attempted for months to communicate with the owner of a web domain who pretended he did not speak English. We sent Chinese-language investigators to his home, but he refused to speak to them.  After several weeks of investigation into the state of his business, we presented him with an offer that was more than fair, and the domain name was transferred to our client.

Our bill was $3,700.

The research into his business was critical because he were able to tell him we knew his business was defunct,  and that his demand would never be met by any other bidder given the oddity of the domain name which matched our client’s name. An email we received from him after the Chinese-speaking investigators visited him was traceable to a large corporation where he was obviously employed. (While he did not use the company’s email address, we could tell from his email header where he was when he sent the email.) Once he could see that we had taken his measure (and after the client raised its offer substantially, but still to a fraction of the original demand), the deal for the domain name was done in a matter of minutes.