BernieMadoff.com For $10,000? In Your Dreams!

Posted on December 17th, 2008 by admin in Domain News | No Comments »

It’s a known fact that a lot of people follow the news or Google hot trends or both in order to pick up on any breaking news and register domain names which can mean solid returns on the flip – if they play their cards right – or so they hope.

Financial “expert” Bernard Madoff was arrested and charged by the FBI last week for allegedly running a $50 billion “Ponzi scheme” in what may rank among the biggest fraud cases ever. Madoff, who has chaired the Nasdaq Stock Market in the past, founded the Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC in 1960. He also ran a hedge fund that U.S. prosecutors said racked up $50 billion of fraudulent losses.

Obviously, as soon as this news broke last week, the term Bernie Madoff made it to the Google hot trends page as reported by the nytimes and someone went ahead and registered the domain name BernieMadoff.com (that someone being a Los Angeles business called Scarab Arts).

They promptly set up an Ebay sales page and plonked a $10,000 initial bid on the domain name hoping to make a profit on the flip. They claim the domain name receives lots of traffic:

Biggest Ponzi Scheme Ever! Huge headlines from all around the world. Big story, lots of traffic…nuff said.

There is only one problem. Their ebay listing has as of now only received 404 visitors. Ok, perhaps their ebay listing hasn’t had much exposure or coverage – the domain will have a lot more traffic right? As of right now, their domain name has had a massive 100 visitors according to their Sedo sales page. Wow, definitely worth the $10,000 investment. NOT.

In case anyone is looking for some more popular terms to flip, the other Madoff family members are on the hot trends page right now: Shana Madoff and Ruth Madoff on positions 20 and 41 to be precise. Not surprisingly, both RuthMadoff.com and ShanaMadoff.com are available to register at the time of writing this post.