Shill Auction Bidding SnapNames.com

This is a sad day for me as a domainer. Scandal has hit this industry extremely hard and has proceeded to rock the boat. According to several valid resources including Elliot’s Blog, Tech Crunch and TheDomains.com a SnapNames employee violated the company’s policy and setup an account.

The employee utilized this account to affect at least 5% of the auctions which took place between 2005 and 2007. The employee was shill bidding. To make this even worst the employee was part of the executive team. Once Oversee acquired SnapNames, they were able to determine that this person was in fact shill bidding.

Now that Oversee is in the middle of this problem, they have done the right thing and readily admitted to the domaining community that shill bidding occurred. They have also issued a statement that they will refund people that were effected by this problem. They will refund the difference between the shill bidding and the actual price that the auction should of ended at.

Hopefully this employee will be tried in court, along with anyone else who might of been involved with such an act. I have nothing else to day as I am utterly disgusted by the topic.