From WFTV news in Orlando, Florida:
A Florida company that sells online commercial payment software has sued its former chief technology officer, claiming that a porn site snapped up its web address when he allowed it to expire.
[...] The St. Petersburg company accuses co-founder and former CTO Lev Gorodinski of keeping vital passwords, software code and other sensitive information after abruptly quitting.
[...] Subsequently, all but one of Epay's 29 customers canceled their contracts, company officials said.
[...] The last customer, a preschool, left when the Epay web domain was turned into a pornography site, the lawsuit alleges.
The company's registration with GoDaddy expired and Gorodinski refused to give the company the information needed to access the account and re-establish its ownership, Epay officials claim.
Why is it always porn sites?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 27 2016, @12:20PM
Auto-renew? I have it on all my domains.
If Florida Man had control over the domain registration (which he did) he could have disabled the auto-renew for the domain or removed the payment type associated to the account. He had total control and obviously used it.
The bigger question here is what did the company do after the domain expired and before it became available again. Normally that's over 30 days (depending on the registrar). Their site should have been down and they should have contacted the registrar to transfer ownership based on registration information and existing business documents.