Tags: internet | scams | squatting

Your help is required in an elaborate conspiracy.

As many of you dear readers might have noticed, the www.think.cz website has been off-line for some time now, actually, since last October.

When we began think.cz back in 1997, we were serious web skeptics, eagerly predicting the dotbomb crash. It was only through the boosterism of our friend David Henderson that we even seriously considered putting any amount of time into building up the site.

Since I've always had an affinity for the suicidal Heaven's Gate cult, I decided to put hundreds of unpaid hours into building the largest website about Prague in the world, so that I too could reach 'Level Above Human'.

We built the original html site around a design by Adam Trachtman which allowed easy quick loading and no pop-up windows. We eventually ended up with a site that had massive traffic, being linked extensively by the major search engines.

Last summer we switched our hosting to Nextra at the suggestion of a friend. Our previous host automatically paid for the domain registration, and included it in our invoice. Well, it was time to renew the domain last December, and I went to the Nextra headquarters to pay it. The clerk accepted my payment and told me that she would notify the technical department about the domain registration.

Imagine my surprise when I find out that "Nextra doesn't accept payments for Nic.cz" and my commercial website had been cyber-squatted by an unscrupulous individual of some notoriety, and as a result we lost a website we had spent years building and advertising in print media as well as on-line.

When I complained, understandably upset, I was told that "that amount has been credited to your account, so why are you so upset?" Such is the logic of even bothering to try and do business in this country.

The asshole who stole my site, his name is Pavel Simon, and his address is Nevanova 1059, 16300 Praha 6. His email address is This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

He's one of those guys who registers companies whose sites have lapsed, and if you contact him he pays the registration fee and then tries to charge you thousands of dollars to get it back. Well, we waited him out, and now it's time to extract our revenge, Count of Monte Cristo style!

And that's where you loyal readers can help; threaten him mercilessly, sent him sacks of sh*t, and when the police come looking for who murdered him... there will be such a large amount of vitriol out there that they won't know where to look. Send us a CC and we'll send you fotos of his beating.

Think.cz is back on-line as of March 12th, 2002. Check it out!