Hi all,
A bit lost on what to do here.
Several years ago I moved all my domains from GoDaddy, Namecheap, Squarespace, Hostgator… maybe more, but I forget–I used a LOT of registrars back when I was young and didn’t realize how disorganized it would all be. Anyway, I moved them to Cloudflare as I typically run everything through Cloudflare these days.
I let most of them lapse, but kept a few for various reasons. Upon a review of my domains today (I am currently adding all of my unused domains to Proton for use with ProtonPass’s alias feature– highly recommend), I clicked into the DNS of one I’ve seen for years but never really looked at what I had configured for it. It’s a cool, techy-sounding .com that could easily be used for a variety of business/project ideas.
For context, this was registered in 2018.
Turns out it has some DNS entries. 3, to be exact:
;; A Records
<my-mystery-site>.com. 1 IN A 23.227.38.32 ; cf_tags=cf-proxied:false
;; CNAME Records
_domainconnect.<my-mystery-site>.com. 1 IN CNAME _domainconnect.gd.domaincontrol.com. ; cf_tags=cf-proxied:true
<my-mystery-site>.com. 1 IN CNAME cryptoflex.myshopify.com. ; cf_tags=cf-proxied:false
The A record IP, 23.227.38.32 resolves to myshopify.com.
Out of curiosity, I visited it in my browser, and to my surprise it loaded. The design is incredibly familiar, and it looks like a SaaS project I likely never finished. There’s definitely been some dev time put into this, and it’s very reminiscent of what I would have built when first starting my web dev career:
- There’s a Plans page
- Dashboard page that is gated by a login (not sure if the Dashboard actually exists or if it’s just there as a placeholder
- Settings page (again, gated by login)
- API Keys page (gated)
- An About page– incredibly embarrassing to read, but the timing of the domain registration matches up perfectly with the entire amateur vibe of the site and content and when I first started my career
- FAQ page with some very interesting info here. It mentions an institution that contacted me recently about an account with an unspecified amount of securities that would be relinquished to my state as abandoned property if I did not claim it– I spent months going back and forth with this institution, and in the end they said they couldn’t verify it and it was likely sent to me as a mistake. They wouldn’t budge when I asked them to investigate further–this could very well be the information I need to get them to do just that!
- A Contact Us page– this somehow works–or at least submitting the form displays a flash alert that the message was successfully sent. Nothing in my inbox though, and I couldn’t find any email buried in the form. Perhaps it’s Shopify contact form? Not too familiar with Shopify anymore, so perhaps that is not a thing.
Discovery! While writing this, I went to try to login. I entered an old email (my primary one during the time of domain registration, now filled with tons of spam and junk. Still have access but don’t use it, except for situations like this) and it immediately detected my old Shopify account and let me login.
Once logged in, I went to all the gated pages and sadly they are just placeholders except for the API Key page. There, I’m able to gen an API key + secret.
Unfortunately it does not show up in My Shopify Admin for that account.
I went ahead and used the Shopify store recovery tool (https://accounts.shopify.com/recovery/stores), and a store popped up that was not on the Admin page: it has a different name, but trying to access it brings me to this auth error page:
Note: I’m still not sure if this is the right shop. The name is different, but the name is quite similar-- uses a buzzword from the same industry.
Now I’m at a complete loss at how to proceed. As far as I’m aware, Shopify doesn’t have the functionality for an API key/secret generation, and I’ve no idea where that service could be running. Any ideas? Also, why can