It just doesn’t add up.

I’ve always questioned the 2008 sale of Fund.com for $10 million. It’s mostly in my gut: why did a new company that went public by buying another company pay a ridiculous price for this domain through a broker I’ve never heard of?

It just doesn’t make sense.

Now someone has dug into it the company a bit more, and the whole thing stinks.

BusinessInsider notes that the company has no real revenue since 2007, has seen its stock (now traded on pink sheets) go as high as $1,205, did a 1 for 120 reverse stock split last year, and is restating its financials from previous years.

It gets worse: the article mentions mobs, Kosovo warlords, a forged signature, mobsters, and ponzi scheme.

Read the article here, then I ask you: do you still believe the $10 million sale of Fund.com is as it seems?

AP sheds light on using toll free numbers to capture business.

The Associated Press published a story this morning about companies that reserve mass quantities of toll free phone numbers, either to capture callers or sell them to businesses that might want to use them.

On the surface this is very similar to domain names. You register a domain name, capture visitors looking for something related to it, and then sell the domain name to a business that wants to use the domain.

Indeed, a number of big domainers were first attracted to toll free numbers, including Rick Schwartz. Another company that is big in domains is the focus of the AP piece — National A-1.

According to the story, a company with similar ownership as National A-1 called PrimeTel owns 1,667,000 of the 7.87 million active 800 numbers. Most of these, according to the article, link to a paid sex talk hotline.

PrimeTel snaps up a many of the numbers the moment they expire. It costs less than 10 cents a month for the company to reserve each number.

For toll free numbers there are rules against “hoarding”, although this appears to be limited to companies like PrimeTel (essentially a toll-free “registrar”) from reserving domains without a specific client use.

Another interesting thing is that the article says PrimeTel has numbers such as 1-800-Metallica and 1-800-Cadillac. Of course there’s no such thing as these toll free numbers — each number on the phone corresponds to multiple letters in the alphabet. So unlike domain names, you can’t argue that PrimeTel is infringing a trademark with any of its numbers.

Decide banks $6 million in series B.

Stealth start up Decide has closed on a $6 million series B round led by Maveron, Madrona Venture Group, Google founding board member Ram Shriram, and former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford, TechCrunch reports.

The company bought Decide.com for $175,000 through domain broker Afternic last December.

At the time it bought the domain, I wrote:

The buyer appears to be someone associated with Seattle based PriceYeti. PriceYeti launched last year, offering to send users an email alert when the price of an item they were tracking online dropped. However, it appears the service is now offline. The whois records for PriceYeti and Decide.com are different, but Decide.com is registered under PriceYeti.

Indeed, TechCrunch writes that Decide “appears to be a re-start of PriceYeti”.

Mobile payments system coming to .tel.

.Tel registry’s regional partner TelChina has inked a strategic partnership with China Mobile to build a mobile payment solution with .tel.

It’s not entirely clear what this entails, but the first phase will enable China Mobile customers to purchase and renew their .tel names via a Mobile-Pay portal using their mobile devices. This phase will be complete in May.

Soon customers will be able to purchase .tel domains using China Mobile credits as well.

Finally, China Mobile will build a .tel-specific portal to enable people to purchase and pay for services using their .tel.

It’s the last one that’s most puzzling — but potentially most interesting.

Tool searches for domain names with keywords that match your parameters.

Here’s an interesting tool to help you find unregistered domain names with competitive advertisers.

TailWords.com lets you search keywords based on a number of factors, from AdWords bid prices to keyword search volume.

But it also has a handy tool for domainers: the ability to show only keywords that have the corresponding .com domain name available (or .net/.org). Just plugin a keyword and the parameters (such as minimum bid price) and it returns a list of domains available to register.

There’s just one catch: most of the domains available to register aren’t in a logical order.

For example, here are some high paying keywords including the word “hotel” that are available as .com:

antoniohotelsan.com instead of SanAntonioHotel.com
hotellondonjobs.com instead of LondonHotelJobs.com
5hotelstar.com instead of 5StarHotel.com

Still, the tool may prove useful for less competitive keywords.