Hs anyone had an experience of this - I mean some idiot has purposely gone out and bought a similar domain to your, or one you want, and then tried to sell it to you for a lot more than a normal registration costs?

Yup; domain squatting is too common. Read http://www.webmaster-talk.com/genera...r-dispute.html for what's probably a happy ending for you.

Yessir, whym. Like Forrest said, it's all too common.

The best thing you can do is to learn what legal stake you have in the domain name vs. their legal stake (usually in the case of the latter, it's none). If you have business interests and they don't, you can usually get it back pretty easily with a firm letter indicating that you know your rights.

I had to do it for a client about 2-3 months ago, actually. The client still thinks it's one of the greatest things he's ever read, even though he doesn't understand half of it (the guy's got a Ph.D and speaks 3 or 4 languages, so if he can't figure it out, it must be good).

Hi there

This kind of thing really annoys me, although no one has ever offered me any similar domains, somone has purchased all similar domains to some of my sites and put a price tag on them.

While the sites dont have anything on them other than a few adverts, they have just been bought in the hope someone will purchase them in the future.

I think this is unfair !

Woc

I'm expecting that by raising this, some spammer/scammer/general village idiot will go out and purchase a similar domain to mine and try selling it back to me.

Try it buddy...

Will you give me $10,000 for SpammerScammerVillageIdiot.com?