I got a mail today trying to sell me www.irishgalleries.com for $460, yeah right.

Still it reminded me of my recent adventures in domain name hell.
Up to recently I owned www.temple-bar.org which I bought for a work at the Project Arts Centre. I registered the domain with Namesecure www. namesecure.com initially for a year. But when I tried to renew the registration I ran into trouble. Their online system gave me 'unspecified errors' every time I tried a renewal, I mailed them - no reply, I emailed them again - still no reply - I tried everything to contact them to no avail. To cut a long story short eventually the domain name expired and was purchased by a cybersquatter before it came on the market. Then, magically, Namesecure replied telling me that my domain name entrusted to them had been sold to someone else and suggesting that I should buy it back at a premium. Of course I complained but guess what I got no response, surprise, surprise.

In conclusion Temple-bar.org is now a porn site which no-one wants to buy, the temple-bar.org site was a temporary project so in the end it doesn't matter that the domain name is gone the content is archived here.
The entire episode is a salutary lesson in how corrupt the domain registration system is. No matter how bad a registrar is (and namesecure are bad) there is no effective regulatory system, it's the wild west and cowboys rule.

Namesecure are not to be trusted with your domain name, they refuse to give any support and I suspect they are deliberatly blocking renewals in order to buy the domain names themselves and sell them back at a premium, you have been warned.