According to Frank Federau, a spokesman for the Lower Saxony police, the 19-year-old is not a computer expert. The boy claims to have merely stumbled across Web sites that described how to do a DNS transfer.
He claimed that "just for fun" he requested a DNS transfer for several sites including Google.de, Web.de, Amazon.de and eBay.de. Most of these transfers were denied, but the transfer for eBay went ahead. It is unclear how the domain could have been transferred without the consent of the owner.
The teenager said he did not want to cause damage. Indeed, according to Federau, he was shocked when he was told that he had become the new owner of the eBay.de Web address. The domain has now been returned to its rightful owner.