Hilarious Threat Email

I've got a bunch of domains. A few times a month, I get an email wondering if I want to sell, rent, lease, give away, etc. one of them. This morning, I got one from a guy who wanted to know about dennis.com

Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 20:38:53 -0700 (PDT)
From: Richard Dennis <rdenniswork@yahoo.com>
Subject: owner of dennis.com
To: Patrick Michael Kane
Cc: ssimmons@GN-solicitors.com

The owner of dennis.com

This it to inform you that we are pursuing the ownership of your domain dennis.com. We are a US company, who have the rights to this domain.

Please let us know if you are willing to part with this domain without legal action.

If not then please confirm that you are the owner and when your ownership / registration ends, business address and communication details so our lawyers can get in touch with you.

Yours,

Richard Dennis
Managing Director

Ohhh, scary! So, I decided to see what I could find out about our Richard Dennis.

richarddennis.com isn't much help -- an annoying flash app where all the links point to yahoo.com. Whois for the domain doesn't give us much more -- no phone numbers, no addresses, just a whole lot of Richard Dennis.

Interestingly, GN-solicitors.com, the domain for his lawyer, isn't even registered. A google search for GN solicitors turns up nothing as well. Odd.

The richarddennis.com webserver is in Britain, but the bulk of the content is hosted on geocities. The flash app lives at http://www.geocities.com/rdenniswork/rddotcom/index.htm, so maybe going up a level to http://www.geocities.com/rdenniswork/ will give us some more detail.

Sure enough, that URL has a message from our friend: "buzzzzz.co.uk brought to you by Rich". Well, let's check out buzzzzz.co.uk.

Hey, Rich aka Buzz is a backpacker! This site doesn't give us a whole lot of personal detail about Buzz, since most of the content is stolen, whole hog, from gapyear.com, but we do get a nice pic of Buzz playing with a kangaroo (mirrored since his site has shutdown on me a few times this morning due to bandwidth caps).

So, our "Managing Director" turns out to be a twenty-something UK backpacker. But why would he threaten to sue me? My guess is that another Richard Dennis probably threatened him with an (ungrounded) lawsuit, so he decided to give it a whirl with me. My response to Buzz:

Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2003 05:02:33 -0700
From: Patrick Michael Kane
To: JohnSmith@Buzzzzz.co.uk
Cc: rdenniswork@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: owner of dennis.com

Buzz:

Thanks for the great laugh!

Dennis.com is in use and not available. If you believe you have a legitimate legal claim on the domain, I'm sure your barrister will be able to tell you how best to bring suit against us.

Best,
--
Patrick Michael Kane

Sue away, Buzz!