A Hijacked Domain: A Cautionary Tale for Photographers and Artists

I was chatting online with fellow Irish photographer David Cleland, and he told me of a rather unfortunate situation that has happened to him. I’ve been following David for a long time. He was one of the first people I knew who was embracing the Fujifilm ecosystem in the early days. He is actually a former Fujifilm X-Photographer, and you may know him through his website, FlixelPix. Unfortunately, through a series of unfortunate events, David has lost control of that domain, and now has a new website where you can find his work.

The trouble began when a missed domain renewal set off a chain reaction that began to dismantle everything attached to it. The FlixelPix website had been online for more than 15 years, and losing it meant not just losing a web address. It also meant losing email accounts tied to the domain, years of search visibility, hard-won backlinks, and the trust of an audience built over time. Missing a domain renewal is something that is surprisingly easy to do, and it nearly happened to me recently too, so I totally feel for David in this situation.

But it gets worse. The domain did not stay dormant. It was picked up and repurposed into an AI-generated photography site, wearing David’s former identity for entirely different purposes. For a year, visitors arriving there could easily have assumed it was still his. It was not.

Then, in October 2025, the domain reappeared at auction.

At first, there was some hope. The opening bid suggested recovery might still be possible. That hope faded quickly: the price climbed past $1,000 and, ultimately, the domain sold for over $1,500, putting it out of reach. In the end, David had to walk away.

The domain has since been acquired and a website is back functioning on it. But the site is not David’s, it’s a bad clone. Parts of the site appear to have been reconstructed from archived material, and at a glance it resembles an earlier version of FlixelPix. But it is not. It is a recycled version of David’s former work, layered with advertising and affiliate content, which are of course, nothing to do with David. It’s a digital hijacking.

David has since rebuilt his presence at a new home: davidcleland.com. It is a fresh start, but not a simple one. Rebuilding means recovering what can be salvaged from backups and archives while accepting that much of what once sustained the original FlixelPix ecosystem, search presence, inbound links, and subscriber routes no longer leads where it should.

That, he says, is the hardest part: not losing the files, but losing the context. The web still remembers what was once his but no longer sends people back to him.

If there is a lesson in this, it is a simple one: do not treat domain ownership as background administration. Auto-renewals fail. Cards expire. Reminder emails get missed. When that happens, the consequences are rarely reversible.

Check your domains. Verify them. Treat them as critical infrastructure. Recovering a lost domain is far harder than preventing the loss in the first place. If you follow or link to the old FlixelPix website, it’s time to update to davidcleland.com. If you know anyone still going to the old site, make sure to inform them so they don’t get duped.