SnapNames Shill Bidding Followup – There Is More To It Than Meets The Eye

Posted on November 5th, 2009 by admin in Domain News | 6 Comments »

The more we find out about the SnapNames employee shill bidding, the seedier it gets.

Adam Strong has followed up on the story in great detail in a must read expose over at DNN, while even Michael Arrington of TechCrunch chose to give his views on the matter – painting the domain industry as a whole with a pretty dirty brush along the way.

According to Adam Strong of DNN, the person behind the username “Halvarez” that has been haunting us in SnapNames auctions over the years is Nelson Brady – who was VP of Engineering at SnapNames.

In haste I wrote in my first post on this matter that SnapNames “was doing the right thing” but the more I think about it the more this looks like an easy way out for SnapNames and Oversee.net – a scape goat has been sacrificed to cleanse the company of all blame.

SnapNames was acquired in 2007 by Oversee.net (aka Domain Sponsor) so it’s interesting that the email sent out to SnapNames members explaining the shill bidding incident stated that most of the shill bidding happened between 2005 and 2007 – before Oversee.net acquired SnapNames – how convenient for them.

I believe this not to be the case, many people (like Rob Sequin) have actual digital proof of Halvarez shill bidding their auctions as recently as this year. It was simply convenient for Oversee.net to state that most of the crap happened before 2007 leaving observers to deduce that Oversee.net is innocent in this matter and is now diligently conducting an investigation and informing the public about it.

Additionally, as Acro rightly points out, SnapNames have vowed to refund – with interest – the difference in bid amounts for any auctions affected by the now infamous Halvarez going all the way back to 2005 – but they have not made the bid history available to each customer – they will instead internally decide who gets the refunds.

So, we will have to take their word for what domain auctions were affected – and accept whatever money they send our way ie we will have to trust them on the matter – something which is hard to do at the moment to be honest.

And finally, if Halvarez was the only person / party to be blamed in all this – why haven’t there been any charges / lawsuits laid against him? It all seems fishy at the moment to be honest.

So, SnapNames, Oversee.net, or whoever else – it’s great that you have outed Halvarez as the culprit, and it’s great that you have got “third party” Rust Consulting to do the audit and figure out what you owe people for the 4 years of fraud committed by Halvarez – but you should really “do the right thing” and make this whole process completely transparent so that we can wash all the dirty brush strokes off of the domaining industry – Michael Arrington and others rightly have a lot of reasons to keep using their dirty brush at the moment.