I’ll start by saying, no, I am not getting some kind of refund relating to bidding in an auction that was proven to have shill bidding taking place on it. While NameJet is doing an internal audit to determine if shill bidding has been impacting their auctions, it looks like they’re also uncovering some payments for auctions that never got made to the seller.
In my case, a handful of domains that I sold in the NamesCon auction earlier this year had sellers that paid late and it looks like somehow my payment got lost in the shuffle.
In my humble opinion I think this is actually pretty awesome. While the purpose of NameJet’s internal investigation is to do a deeper dive into shill bidding that may have happened on their platform, it’s nice to see them uncovering other totally unrelated errors and doing the right thing.
As you all know, just about every waking minute of my life is dedicated to running a startup so it’s easy for something like this, especially when it’s not a huge amount of money, to just slip right under the radar. If NameJet didn’t email me I would have never known but the fact that they did shows me that this internal audit isn’t just to understand if shill bidding took place, it’s to make sure everything across-the-board is being done right.
While I do hope that the result of this investigation leads to better processes for preventing shill bidding in the future, I do have to say I’m happy to see NameJet going so deep here to really make sure everything they’re doing is done right. Of course nobody would be thrilled to find out that they never got paid for domains they sold six months prior…but hey, better late than never right?
