What a timely post Nick. A friend of mine was thinking about making a site and had spent several hours on godaddy scoping out names. He had a list of maybe 20 names, and finally selected one. Note these names were pretty long and nothing really special. He goes in to register it the next day (20 hours after looking them up) and the SAME GUY from Hong Kong had registered it earlier that day.
My thoughts are 3-fold. 1) my friend has some spyware that allows his surfing to be monitored (although I hardly think it would be worth it to try and “extort” new domain names). 2) He has some sort of automated program at godaddy to autoregister names that have been searched (although my friends other domains he searched were still available.) The most likely culprit IMO is what I have read about on Bob Parson’s blog called domain kiting http://www.bobparsons.com/DomainKiting.html. The article is really interesting and you should read it, but in a nutshell, it is someone who sets up a registrar solely to exploit a loophole in the name registration process. They profit by temporarily auto registering thousands of names for 7 days at a time, putting up an adwords/clickable type landing page on it, then cancelling the registration during the add/drop period. Net result, no cost to them, and free adwords clicks for 1000 sites for 7 days at a time. The ones that make enough clicks to register, they do, and the rest they drop. The fact that the admin contact is [email protected] and when you go to that domain, there is just a dummy page reinforces this possibility.
The good news is that if number 3 is the case, it may be available in 6 days or so.
Hope this helps,
CBW
Edit: fixed the link.