SnapNames Employee Bid in Domain Auctions, Cleanup in Progress
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009
SnapNames employee bid in auctions, but the bigger news is how company is handling it.
You’ll probably read a lot today about how a SnapNames employee had been bidding on auctions for the past four years. In case you haven’t heard the story, here’s a brief recap:
-Employee opened account in another name and started bidding in 2005
-Participated in about 5% of auctions, mostly between 2005-2007
-S/He won about 1% of the auctions during this period (so about 20% of the auctions he participated in)
The employee’s actions violated SnapNames policy.
This is obviously bad news for SnapNames and Oversee.net. But how they have handled the situation shows the company’s commitment to professionalism and making things right.
It had a policy in place. First, it’s important to remember that SnapNames had a policy in place prohibiting employees from bidding in auctions, as the company told me after the GoDaddy flareup. That wasn’t the case at GoDaddy, although that has since been rectified.
After discovering the problem, SN did a full investigation. Based on material released from SnapNames, it’s clear that the company did an entire audit back to 2005 to figure out exactly which domain auctions were effected. Apparently the employee’s bidding accounted for about 1% of total SnapNames revenue. [Update: it appears that some people have speculated about the user involved for some time. Acro on DNForum even wrote back in 2006 "Some have speculated Halvarez is Snapnames, which I don't believe." Domain Name News has confirmed that username "Halvarez" was the associated employee.]
SnapNames released the story to its customers and media. Rather than push the issue under the rug, SnapNames sent a release to domain bloggers today informing them of the problem and what it is doing to resolve it.
The company is putting its money where its mouth is. Rather than just say “sorry”, SnapNames is going to pay –literally. The company will offer a rebate to customers who bid in auctions against the SnapNames employee, which would have caused them to pay more for the domain than if the employee had not bid. In addition to the rebate, it will pay interest.
To summarize, this is an unfortunate event for SnapNames and the domain industry. But the cleanup shows that the industry is growing up and becoming more professional. SnapNames is taking responsibility for its (employee’s) actions, and should be commended.
I also hope that other domain auction sites heed the warning and set up internal controls.
Further Reading:
- SnapNames Introduces New Monthly Auctions
- Moniker Sends Silent Auctions to SnapNames
- Domain Auctions: Chill Out, But Let’s Re-examine
Tags: SnapNames
SnapNames Employee Bid in Domain Auctions, Cleanup in Progress – http://tinyurl.com/ycw9m8w
OUCH! RT @DomainNameWire: #domains SnapNames Employee Bid in Domain Auctions, Cleanup in Progress http://bit.ly/4bzaR
RT @AlanBleiweiss RT @bobbykircher: Snapnames employee caught bidding on domain names since 05. Co offering refunds http://bit.ly/3pd9UY
Any word on whether or not they will recover and re-auction the domains that ‘Halvarez’ won?
Alan – I doubt it, that would take legal action I suspect.
@ Alan – also looks like he’s sold a lot of the domains already. Thread at DNForum shows that he sold a bunch to iREIT.
It’s just a matter of time before the person’s real identity is discovered.
“-Participated in about 5% of auctions, mostly between 2005-2007″
5% of all auctions go to one “customer” ?
How can that not be noticed for so long? Impossible!
Which are some of the domains he won? Lets look at the whois.
Rene wrote “How can that not be noticed for so long? Impossible!”
I suspect this may have come to light when Craig Snyder joined Oversee and took over SN and Moniker. I can picture a meeting where he’s suddenly like “who is this guy that accounts for so much revenue”. Just speculating, but the timing…
I wish I had a dollar for every time Snap was informed that halverez must be an insider. I contacted them several times myself. The big question is what took so long.
I think everybody has had the experience of ordering a really lame or obscure name at snap, only to see Halverez as the second bidder.
Swinginchicks.com is one he won.
But it’s the ones he didn’t win that do the real damage.
This explains why he was always 2nd bidder in so many of my auctions.
Criminal charges I hope are in this guy’s future.
Also, I doubt the 5% figure. I have been in over 10,000 snap auctions and I’d guess that halverez was in 80% of them.
hope snap will put him in some 1$ auction
Hilarious!
I went to check my order history at Snap and it only has 2 pages.
These idots better stop playing games.
[...] DomainNameWire reports, DomainNameNews have confirmed the customer username in question is Halvarez, while Acro mentioned [...]
There is definitely more than one account involved in this fraud.
I can count at least 3 accounts at snapnames that drove up prices on my auctions by tens of thousands of dollars in some cases.
halavarez, hidden, vaxcis
I believe this is all the work of Nelson Brady who used some very high pressure techniques to get people to pay on these rigged auctions.
Mike – I assume by Vaxcis you mean Vertical Axis. That’s Ham’s company. There are a lot of legitimate people who bid up actions.
Without the order history nobody will be able to calculate their refund.
I call on Snap/oversee to stop playing games now.
Tony – given that he refunded part of the money back to his account, he basically stole money. I’m sure a lawsuit or settlement of some sort is forthcoming.
Snapnames should do it like Sedo and others
Just call them bidder 1, bidder 2, bidder 3…
Noone will ever find out if the bid is from Sedo itself. Cheating made easy.
Actually, Sedo should show the bidders names, so we can see their “Halvarez” in action.
Rene – Sedo has the strictest policy of all domain companies I know of.
Word on the street is that Nelson is Halverez.
Andrew you should remove posts with personal info. Not cool imho regardless of what happened or what this persond did do.
Well, here’s proof that snapnames owes me money
http://robsequin.com/images/halvarez-bids.gif
This screen cap shows me (I am whatever bidder ID) bidding against Halvarez from $59 to a winning bid of $160 with no other bidders in between. So, there’s $101 coming my way and I know I bid against Halvarez MANY MANY times.
The latest that I can find Halvarez in one of my auctions is from March 2009
http://robsequin.com/images/halvarez-march-2009.gif
If he is bidder ID ppppp too, I’m gonna be getting an even bigger check.
He is not ppppp. I am sure of that.
[...] Name Wire also is talking about this Snapnames incident, which is sure to be another black eye: This is obviously bad news for SnapNames and Oversee.net. [...]
[...] Earlier today I talked to Santiago A. Cueto, the first lawyer to file a lawsuit against Snapnames for the insider bidding scandal. [...]
[...] a major domain industry event, I like to get both sides of the story. So when the news about the SnapNames insider bidding scandal broke, one of my first calls was to the man allegedly at the center of the controversy, former Snapnames [...]
[...] Another lawsuit seeking class action status has been filed against Oversee.net over the SnapNames insider bidding scandal. [...]
[...] november 2009 it was revealed that a SnapNames employee placed bids in the site’s domain auctions over a time-span of 4 [...]