Union, N.J. - Members of the New Jersey State Police Cyber Crimes Unit arrested a Union County man last week for stealing a domain name, the first known arrest for this crime in New Jersey. Detectives charged Daniel Goncalves, 25, of Union Township, with theft by unlawful taking or disposition, theft of identity, and computer theft. He allegedly then sold the domain name, p2p.com, to Mark Madsen of the NBA’s Los Angeles Clippers. Goncalves was released on $60,000 bail. The domain naming system is a moderately regulated system of registrars who have received authority through ICANN, (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), to register domain names for individuals and companies. Domain names are the readable addresses used by individuals and corporations to identify their presence on the Internet. Two and three letter domain names are particularly valuable as they are easy to remember and generate larger amounts of traffic, which produce revenue. Because of its short length and topical relation to the exploding Peer to Peer file sharing phenomenon, p2p.com was particularly valuable, with an estimated value of between $160,000 and $200,000, police said. The New Jersey State Police Cyber Crimes Unit started looking into the theft in October 2008 after representatives of P2P, LLC contacted the New Jersey State Police saying their domain name had been stolen from their GoDaddy account in May, 2006 and they pinpointed the theft to someone in New Jersey. P2P, LLC, which was located in Florida, had been investigating the matter privately since May 2007. A check of the P2P, LLC corporate GoDaddy domain account revealed that the domain name had been transferred without their knowledge or consent almost a year earlier. Investigators found that the same IP address used to log into the P2P, LLC account and initiate the transfer was used to log into Goncalves’ own GoDaddy account and receive the transferred domain, completing the theft. Attempts were made a short time later to transfer the domain to a different registrar, but ICANN rules prohibit the transfer for 60 days. Goncalves allegedly transferred the domain name 69 days later. He again transferred the domain name before selling it to Madsen in September of 2006. Madsen was unaware that it was stolen. “The domain name industry is in some respects still like the wild west. Many of the rules are not yet codified into state laws, let alone federal or international laws,” said Colonel Rick Fuentes, superintendent of the New Jersey State Police. “There is no deed for ownership of a domain name. In most cases they are protected solely by a login and password for the site through which they are registered. Nevertheless, theft is theft, and that law that can be applied whenever possession of an own-able thing is improperly transferred for gain,” Fuentes added.