New Delhi: It was a big moment for 21-year-old Amal Augustine, a B.Tech student from Kochi, when he received an email from Facebook stating the social media giant was interested in purchasing an Uniform Resource Identifier (URL) owned by the former.
Facebook approached Amal for the domain name he had registered in the name of company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg's daughter, Maxime Chan Zuckerberg. Amal had booked maxchanzuckerberg.com, immediately after Zuckerberg's daughter was born on December 1 last year.
The request to purchase the domain came as a casual email from GoDaddy, an internet domain registrar and web hosting company, asking if he was willing to sell the domain name by the end of last month and for how much.
According to reports when the mail came closing the deal, he realised it was FB. The mail was from Sarah Kim of ICONIQ Capital, the wealth manager of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
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The engineering student said that his passion for filing internet domain names has earned him a small profit. He received $700 (approximately Rs 46,000) in the deal with FB. Also this is not the only domain he has, but he has bought several domains and waits for someone to approach them to buy it.
Cyber experts say that this is an instance of cyber squatting, which involved social media giant Mark Zuckerberg. Cyber squatting is the act of registering a popular Internet address with the aim of selling it to its rightful owner. It is just like gambling; you invest in domains that you think will be valuable in the future and then get a good amount later.
Amal is a third-year electronic and communication student at KMEA Engineering College, Aluva. He is also an active IT quiz participant who has won many prizes in competitions across the state.
