The New Jersey State Police Cyber Crimes Unit charged Daniel Goncalves with identity theft and computer theft as part of their investigation into the theft of the domain name P2P.com from Albert and Lesli Angel and their investor partner Marc Ostrofsky, which allegedly occurred in 2006.
It’s the first ever criminal prosecution for domain name theft in the U.S., according to DomainNews, but the civil case concerning the sex.com domain was eventually settled by the Supreme Court in 2003.
Goncalves was sued by the Angels in 2007 in civil court in New Jersey for taking over the Angels’ e-mail account and using it to obtain the P2P.com domain, but the case was not resolved. He then sold the domain on eBay to NBA basketball player Mark Madsen.