DomainTools Whois History Database allows you to view historical whois records:
This can be useful for several reasons. However I find it most useful for uncovering potential ownership information for a domain that currently is using a privacy protection service.
In other words, even if a company uses a privacy protection service, often you can still identify the possible ownership of the domain if there were updates to the DomainTools Whois History Database between the creation date of the domain and the date that privacy prtoection was put on.
The image below shows a list of dates that the DomainTools Whois History Database has for whois records of a domain called TVShows.org:
Whois History for TVShows.org
The red dates are the records with privacy protect on them. The blue dates are the records without privacy protection. Usually the record of interest is the record just before privacy protection was put on.
The image below shows the 2007-12-28 record for TVShows.org. In the screenshot, I’ve blacked out identifying information, however the actual record shows full name, address, phone, etc. for the registrant (who is typically the domain owner):
Whois Record TV Shows 2007-12-29
An interesting thing to keep in mind is the following:
Some registrants put fake data in Whois records. However, if a registrant suddenly puts on privacy protection when there was no privacy protection before, then it’s likely (thought not guaranteed) that the whois records prior to the date privacy protection was implemented are accurate (i.e., why put on privacy protection if the prior records were fake anyhow?)
Of course there can be other reasons for suddenly implementing privacy protection even if prior whois records were faked (like, a registrant doesn’t want to get caught faking whois data, but still wants privacy), but in my experience that’s usually not the case.
Visit DomainTools.com (Whois History Database is only available with the paid version of DomainTools)
