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Mark Madsen: Clipper, ex-Laker and domain name speculator

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Madsen Clippers forward Mark Madsen. Credit: AP

In a strange series of events befitting the shady world of domain name speculation, New Jersey state police arrested a man on suspicion of stealing the rights to p2p.com and selling them to Los Angeles Clipper forward Mark Madsen.

Daniel Gonclave, 25, of Union, N.J., is suspected of hacking into the GoDaddy.com account of p2p.com’s previous owner, transferring ownership to himself and then selling it to Madsen on eBay for $111,000. Although the domain name may have been illegally acquired, Madsen reportedly still owns it.

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What ever would the “Mad Dog” want with a website associated with peer-to-peer (p2p) file sharing?

It turns out, surprisingly, that Madsen is an active domain name speculator. That’s the rather odd subculture of people who buy domain names like beer.com and yeti.tv, hoping to resell them down the road at awesome profit.

Several blogs have linked Madsen to account names on EBay and various message boards, where he looks to have sold or tried to sell dozens of low-, middle- and high-dollar domain names. Those included Internetdating.com, denial.com, carbohydrates.com and even registeredsexoffender.com.

Tom Ziller at Fanhouse has quite a bit more. He writes:

Madsen’s activity on DNForum, as well as the big-dollar purchase of P2P.com, indicates the player was in deep in this industry ... A year ago, he offloaded dozens of Canadian domain names-- including lovelies like chocolatecandy.ca, accordians.ca, schooners.ca and the epic menstrualperiods.ca -- for $21,000. On eBay, he sold two domains in June for a total of $7,000.

A person sounding very much like Madsen answered a phone number listed in one of the forum posts, but declined to comment on the New Jersey case, saying he and his attorneys planned to put out a statement about the situation Tuesday.

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Madsen is an active Twitterer and maintains a blog where he (irregularly) posts thoughts about the basketball world. But neither his Twitter stream not his blog yields any evidence of Madsen’s low-profile second career as a speculator.


Follow my variable-rate stream of tech and culture-related musings at @dsarno
-- David Sarno

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