Be Wary of Used.com and Penny.com Auctions at Sedo
Friday, August 29th, 2008
“Meet the seller” shows these auctions may be bogus.
I was excited to see that Used.com and Penny.com were on auction at Sedo today. These are both six figure domains. But my excitement was tempered after looking at the “meet the seller” data on the auctions.
“Meet the seller” is a new feature Sedo introduced this week. It allows you to see details about the seller of a domain, including their country, when they joined Sedo, and a rating of their activity.
For both Used.com and Penny.com, the seller shows as being in the Philippines. But the owner of Penny.com is in Connecticut and Used.com is in Minnesota. Furthermore, the seller just joined Sedo in April and has no seller rating.
I’ve contacted Sedo to investigate and will let you know when I hear back. If it turns out these are bogus auctions, then Sedo’s new features will have proven valuable. Before “meet the seller” I’d think little about these auctions and they would continue without questioning. We’d get excited, spend time bidding, only to find out we wasted our time.
Update 2:50PM: Sedo has canceled the auctions:
We have canceled these two auctions as it is clear that the person who listed them is not the owner. We do have systems in place to prevent people from listing domains they do not own, but unfortunately some will occasionally get through and we don’t catch it as early as we would like. Of course this is frustrating and we are constantly looking at ways to minimize this with automatic and manual methods.
I would like to stress to our customers that all they have been somewhat inconvenienced, they are not in any danger of losing money, as a seller is not paid until a domain is transferred.
I think Sedo does a good job verifying listings, but obviously it’s not impossible to slip something through.
Tags: sedo
I missed the Penny one.. I didn’t even check because of the price, but should of thought of that as well.
They could just use a proxy in US to get around it I guess..
Good save and heads up…
Grateful for the alert-aloha
Sedo has brought tons of credibility to domain parking and sales.
A great example of how a degree of transparency can help build trust and confidence in the auction marketplace
Instead of cutting down on fraudulent submissions, Sedo introduced a series of features that clearly violate the sellers’ privacy. I expect a lot of sales to go south because of the buyer being wary of the seller’s locale and vice versa (the seller can now view where the bidding buyer is at as well).
Acroplex, reason would say not to worry about the buyer or seller’s locale. That’s why there’s escrow. Are you trying to say something else? It only shows what country you are in. I think it’s reasonable for someone to know the country you live in.