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en WordPress.com Forums Domain with WordPress hijacked – my website is now a Chinese gambling site

Domain with WordPress hijacked – my website is now a Chinese gambling site

  • ttsheehan · Member · Feb 18, 2024 at 4:36 pm
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    I bought my domain through GoDaddy years ago then paid the fees to have everything transferred to WordPress. Set up my site and everything has been fine, I have all the fees set to AutoPay so I didn’t have to worry about losing my domain / site. Yet somehow the website which is listed on my resume, social media, etc is now being diverted to some Chinese gambling page instead of mine and I checked the fees are still up to date and AutoPay is still on so I’ve been paying for their use. How to get my domain back? I’m still paying for WordPress to have being dealing with this and never authorized them to transfer my work to anyone.

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • staartmees · Member · Feb 18, 2024 at 5:38 pm
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    According to https://completedns.com/dns-history/ your domain was removed from wordpress.com almost a year ago in Februari 2023. In april 2023 someone bought your domain.

    You just have to wait untill a Staff member is available to so what’s going on.

  • ttsheehan · Member · Feb 18, 2024 at 5:51 pm
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    According to the company WordPress told me to talk to about retrieving my domain WordPress “released” my domain to the public so it was picked up by someone else and registered with another company despite the fact I’ve been paying on it to WordPress. The second company is refusing to return control even though I never authorized WordPress to release anything especially since I’ve continued paying on this.

  • staartmees · Member · Feb 18, 2024 at 6:53 pm
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    WordPress.com just doesn’t release.a domain. Only expired domains are released after a lengthy period.

    You can see your payments yourself under My Purchases.

    Again: you just have to wait untill a Staff member is available as they have insight to what happened..

  • ttsheehan · Member · Feb 18, 2024 at 6:57 pm
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    That literally was the FIRST thing I checked because I could have sworn I had everything on autopayment. It’s still on autopayment and I’m still being charged. I came here to find help on how to get my domain back.

  • staartmees · Member · Feb 18, 2024 at 7:04 pm
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    You just have to wait untill a Staff member is available as they have insight to what happened..

  • aisajib · Staff · Feb 19, 2024 at 5:38 am
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    Hi there!

    It looks like you only pointed the domain to your WordPress.com site using Domain Connection instead of transferring the domain registration to us.

    As a result, your domain remained registered with GoDaddy. It was working because you pointed it to your WordPress.com site. But you had to renew the domain with GoDaddy to keep it active or transfer its registration to us. You can click here to see that what you have with us is a Domain Connection, which is used for connecting an externally registered domain with WordPress.com.

    Because you never transferred the registration to us, we never had the ability to renew it for you. It sounds like the domain expired with GoDaddy, and it was registered by another party when it was available for registration again.

    At this point, you can contact GoDaddy support to see if they can help with getting this domain back. If not, I’m afraid you may have to use a new domain.

    Feel free to let us know if you have more questions.

  • ttsheehan · Member · Feb 19, 2024 at 2:45 pm
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    This is really frustrating because GoDaddy says I transferred the domain to WordPress in January 2023 which is why I posted here to get help

    I keep getting bounced around from company to company with each company saying it’s someone else’s fault while I’ve got credit card charges showing I’ve been paying for a website and marketing someone else has gotten for free

    At this point what I’m hearing is my only solution is to cancel everything and start from scratch?

  • staff-totoro · Staff · Feb 19, 2024 at 7:37 pm
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    Hi there,

    According to the purchase history we see on our end, the last payment you had related to artisticbent.org was on April 12, 2019. You can confirm by viewing the receipt here: https://wordpress.com/me/purchases/billing/37194115

    This upgrade expired in 2020 due to lack of renewal payments, and the Premium (now called Explorer) plan was removed at that time. As noted above, we show there was only a ‘domain connection’ for artisticbent.org, which is charged at $0. I do not see any purchase history for a domain transfer of artisticbent.org here. I do see that you renewed the plan upgrade on artisticbentorg.wordpress.com but I do not see that a domain was transferred at that time. You can confirm here: https://wordpress.com/me/purchases/billing/79028532

    As stated previously, while artisticbent.org was connected to as at one point (based on settings you added to your domain while it was at GoDaddy) it was never transferred to our registry. Sadly we are not able to help with your situation regarding artisticbent.org.

    Let us know if you have any further questions.

  • The topic ‘Domain with WordPress hijacked – my website is now a Chinese gambling site’ is closed to new replies.

Tags

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About this topic

  • In: Support
  • 4 participants
  • 8 replies
  • Last activity 8 months
  • Latest reply from ttsheehan
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