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Bidding on your own names at NameJet...?

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Once in awhile I see people bidding on their own domains at NJ. I would think it would be frowned upon.

Today's seems more obvious than normal. Or am I missing something here?

Airlinejobs.com owned by Andy Booth at Booth.com and high bidder is BQDNcom (James Booth).

3 bids down we see Boothcom as a bidder.

Same thing with MovieZone.com. Owned by Andy Booth in which he currently appears to be the high bidder.

High Bid: $2,475 USD by boothcom

They actually won their own domain airplanesforsale.com. Im guessing it didnt get as high as they wanted so needed to protect it.

Bidder Amount Date
bqdncom $2,001 7/17/2017 12:23 PM
boothcom $1,950 7/17/2017 12:23 PM
 
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Taryn is Frank Schilling's bid handle. He uses a bidding bot to automatically place bids for him.

Yeah - the thread suggesting Taryn was a bot had a link which included comments suggesting he was eNom's VP (which has been debunked)...

http://www.domainnamenews.com/miscellaneous/namejetcom-employees-not-allowed-to-bid/1673
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I am going to post my experiences dealing with Oliver Hoger. He is currently my client as a seller and I have immense trust and loyalty towards him.

I first started dealing with Oliver last summer. Over a period of 6 months I sold him more than 3000x 4L.COM domain names. All deals was conducted swiftly and professionally. Once a price was agreed on he stuck to it, market fluctuations or not. Some of these deals was done via direct wire transfer, where Oliver wired high 5 figure sums directly to my seller.

I subsequently witnessed Oliver sell 100s of these 4L.COM names at a loss, both at 4.CN and at Namejet.

Later I dealt with Oliver as a seller. I sold a large number of 4L.COMs for him here at NP at competitive BIN prices. Oliver always honoured his word, even in the few cases were he received higher offers for names that were promised to my buyers.

My personal experience dealing with Oliver is that of a man of integrity and honesty. I have also meet Oliver in person at the Domaining Europe conference this year and I can assure you he is a down to earth and intelligent guy, whom I can not square with the very serious allegations put forth in this thread.

I have spoken to Oliver about this issue and he will be posting here tonight directly pertaining to the allegations and actions that have seen light.
Please forward these posts to Oliver:

https://www.namepros.com/posts/6265695
https://www.namepros.com/posts/6266130
https://www.namepros.com/posts/6265998
https://www.namepros.com/posts/6266526


In his response he should systematically address and debunk those findings with substantial evidence.
 
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Here are some of the posts that have been directed at @MediaOptions, and while he has been very active in this thread, he has ignored all of them:

@promo:
its against the TOS you agreed to when you signed up at NJ. I know you do it yourself since its not more than 3 months since you bid on one of your LLL.COMs you had another seller put up.

@Dream Big:
In early 2016 when I was bidding for 6N Chips at NJ, I was puzzled at @MediaOptions bidding on his own names. Now I know why he did because system allowed it. Sorry to say @NameJetGM , its very unethical.

@Beezy:
@MediaOptions, have you ever won your own names at namejet?

@rentmynames:
@MediaOptions , I don't care what your arguments are (right or wrong), I do care if you read this or not

As an official statement from NameJet – our policy is clear that sellers cannot bid on their own domains, period.

from @NameJetGM ?

@TheDot.shop:
I am still interested to know if Andrew @MediaOptions ever bid on his own auctions at NameJet? The question has been asked by a few members but has yet to be addressed by Andrew!

@Hemanttilotia:
Booth brothers, Seek aka Oliver, MediaOptions have all been involved in shill bidding.

@Suzoki:
I guess @MediaOptions will go silent as well now. Birdie got caught trying to justify his buddy's bad bad actions. Which other defender of Shill bidding will be revealed??

Why hasn't Andrew Rosener commented on or responded to any of this? He was very active in this thread while all these posts were made, and he ignored all of them. He, more than anyone in this industry, always jumps in to aggressively defend himself. Why the sudden silence?

If he has not been bidding on his own auctions, and his own names listed by other sellers, he should just make a statement to categorically deny all such accusations. It's very out of character of him to not say anything at all. It would take him one minute to say that he has never bid on his own auctions or domains.
 
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I skipped over the last 20 pages for sake of sanity and time.

Just wanted to make a comment about whois information.

With the new guidelines it's sometimes a pain in the ass to change the contact info. @stub and I just did a deal on NP where the domain wouldn't change accounts while simultaneously changing the whois. So I pushed the name with my contact info. The domain is defiantly in his account and he owns it, but anyone looking up the whois would think I still owned the name.

Yeah, There is something terribly wrong (or unclear) about GoDaddy transfers in and pushes But to correct Ike, the whois has been resolving correctly since I stopped bugging him :) Maybe a week ago (time flies). But what Ike says is correct. I had a domain push from him, which could not be accepted with a change of whois to me. The rest of this long sorry story is not really a topic for this thread. How difficult can it be to change the whois of a transfer or push to the account holder? Other Registrars manage this trick, effortlessly.
 
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Tucows acquired Rightside's interest in Namejet as a part of the eNom acquisition:

http://domainnamewire.com/2017/01/20/tucows-acquires-enom-rightside/

I wonder if Tucows might have a cause of action against Rightside to recover some of the money they paid in that deal, if these issues weren't fully disclosed to Tucows when they acquired Namejet. Conceivably, this might end up impacting the Donuts acquisition of Rightside (and might be reflected at some point in Rightside's stock price).

NB: I don't have any position in Tucows or Rightside shares (although my company is a happy customer of Tucows).

Is that deal even concluded yet?
 
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Is that deal even concluded yet?

I believe that the Tucows acquisition is complete. The Donuts deal isn't, though.
 
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I am going to post my experiences dealing with Oliver Hoger. He is currently my client as a seller and I have immense trust and loyalty towards him.
I first started dealing with Oliver last summer. Over a period of 6 months I sold him more than 3000x 4L.COM domain names. All deals was conducted swiftly and professionally. Once a price was agreed on he stuck to it, market fluctuations or not. Some of these deals was done via direct wire transfer, where Oliver wired high 5 figure sums directly to my seller.

I subsequently witnessed Oliver sell 100s of these 4L.COM names at a loss, both at 4.CN and at Namejet.

Later I dealt with Oliver as a seller. I sold a large number of 4L.COMs for him here at NP at competitive BIN prices. Oliver always honoured his word, even in the few cases were he received higher offers for names that were promised to my buyers.

My personal experience dealing with Oliver is that of a man of integrity and honesty. I have also meet Oliver in person at the Domaining Europe conference this year and I can assure you he is a down to earth and intelligent guy, whom I can not square with the very serious allegations put forth in this thread.

I have spoken to Oliver about this issue and he will be posting here tonight directly pertaining to the allegations and actions that have seen light.

This is what is wrong in the industry, defending a fraud makes you look just as bad. I almost did a deal with Oliver in the past but the dude was sketchy as Fuck. Like I mentioned before, I been in this business for 20 years, I seen it all, and I can spot a scumbag 1 mile away.
 
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We're looking for Florida residents now to file with the Florida Attorney General's office ASAP.
Florida resident here. I was shilled out of over $5K.
 
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Yeah, Namejet's system is really weird. I've also noticed that there are a couple of bidders whose bids always have the wrong date...Could be nothing but I can't see why every time these accounts bid, they have the wrong year...
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I was really curious what the damage appears to be so far, so I wrote a script to analyze around 1.55 million bids and generate recommended refunds. I realize this is very premature because NameJet hasn't even confirmed or denied that these accounts participated in shill bidding or determined how to move forward, but I've heard people throwing out some wild guesses like tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars lost and I really doubted that to be the case. In the interest of transparency I want to discuss my method a bit, although several people have told me this approach is still too kind to NJ.

What I did was I looked for public auctions with reserve met, where one of the suspicious aliases was the runner up. Then I looked for the next legitimate bid that wasn't the winner or the suspicious aliases being looked at. That third-party bid was used as the baseline. If the next bid was made by the winner, that became the amount the auction should have closed at. If the next bid was a suspicious alias, I used one bid increment (based on the price level) above the third-party bid to be the new closing price.

This solution isn't perfect because it still works with the "new" price even if that wouldn't have met reserve. In my view the correct way to handle this scenario is to let the winner have it at the calculated price, even if that was below the reserve. I don't think a shill bidder should have rights to enforce a reserve after the deed. The only other options I can think of would be to treat the reserve as the "new" price, or to offer a full refund and the winner returns the domain which might have been sold on already.

Some people feel this method is still too generous and that all of the shill bids should be removed, because it only credits winners when the runner-up was a shill. Take, for example, a situation where the shiller went back and forth with someone, the legitimate bidder led, and then a third party jumped in to win. My method would say that no refund is due at all, even though the auction may have ended much lower without the shill.

But I stand by this method because trying to figure out where this scenario would have ended is messy at best, and is likely impossible. No way to know where in the bidding one of the two real bidders would have given up, and the only reasonable case you can actually make is that it would have ended in the same place (but that ignores the "social proof" of the shill).

Anyway, let me give you the output from a single auction to make it more clear:

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filet.com closed on 2017-07-10 at $9800
Refund of $2200 is recommended for juggernaut. ($9800 - $7600)
http://www.namejet.com/Pages/Auctions/StandardDetails.aspx?auctionid=3951668

Reasoning:
juggernaut bid $9800 at 2017-07-10 16:16:00
hkdn bid $9700 at 2017-07-10 16:16:00
hkdn bid $9564 at 2017-07-10 16:11:00
juggernaut bid $9464 at 2017-07-10 16:11:00
hkdn bid $8989 at 2017-07-10 16:10:00
juggernaut bid $8889 at 2017-07-10 16:10:00
hkdn bid $8588 at 2017-07-10 16:05:00
juggernaut bid $8488 at 2017-07-10 16:05:00
hkdn bid $8388 at 2017-07-10 16:05:00
juggernaut bid $8288 at 2017-07-10 16:05:00
hkdn bid $8164 at 2017-07-10 16:00:00
juggernaut bid $8064 at 2017-07-10 16:00:00
hkdn bid $7878 at 2017-07-10 15:55:00
juggernaut bid $7778 at 2017-07-10 15:55:00
hkdn bid $7600 at 2017-07-10 15:43:00 <= Winner would have bid this with no shill.
neally bid $7500 at 2017-07-10 15:43:00 <= Last legitimate third-party bid.
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This is a prime example of the reserve issue. The only way hkdn could have bid twice at the end was if the reserve was not met yet, so that means the reserve was likely somewhere between $9,700 and $9,799 and the "new" price would be way below the reserve. But I still think the recommendation is good.

Here are the results broken down by suspicious alias, across all five seller accounts:

SEEK: $3,582 in recommended refunds across 16 auctions.
WINNER8888: $19,171 in recommended refunds across 40 auctions.

I'm running this separately because I'm still not sure hkdn is a shill, although all evidence points to it and nothing that I can find points to it being a legitimate bidder with a real identity. But anyway:

HKDN: $839,346 in recommended refunds across 2243 auctions.

The number of auctions affected don't exactly match up to the number of times each alias was a runner up that I mentioned before. The reason is that, let's say HKDN was the runner up but seek was the winner, in that case it wouldn't recommend a refund or be considered an affected auction. Plus I also gathered a little more data.

So that's either $22,753 in refunds if hkdn is legitimate, or $862,099 in refunds if the alias is a shill, using a method that may be generous to NameJet. The first two aliases seem to mostly push the reserve and then walk away, or place a few early bids, maybe to move it up when people sort by bid/price. So while the calculated refunds aren't astronomical if HKDN is real, it is still a big deal because these two aliases still unduly influenced more than 1,250 auctions in some way or another even if it wasn't a run-up at the end. If HKDN is a shill it's a really, really big problem.

Obviously NameJet may find no fault, or they may find fault but not give refunds, or choose a different method for calculating refunds. This report is completely unofficial, may be incomplete, and I have no involvement in this decision so don't take it too seriously. Just wanted to get people's heads out of the stratosphere.

I also looked into "russell" that several people mentioned. I really, really hope you guys are wrong about that because that account has been active since at least 2008, has been involved in nearly 25k auctions (6.7k of which were Oliver's), and placed more than $2 million in back orders and bids. I'll look into this more when I have time and more WHOIS history queries.

If anyone wants the output for their particular alias just shoot me an email to [email protected] (replace xx).
 
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Yeah, Namejet's system is really weird. I've also noticed that there are a couple of bidders whose bids always have the wrong date...Could be nothing but I can't see why every time these accounts bid, they have the wrong year...
I believe those are old back orders that weren't deleted by the user(s).
 
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Big THUMBS UP for the "Investigation" you guys are doing here!!!
 
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This issue is bigger than most of us think. Manipulating numbers at Namejet affects pricing across the whole industry not just Namejet. Mark my words, this is going to be the biggest thing to hit the domain industry ever. It's going to make the Adam Dicker scandal look like a joke.

Watch, prices on the most manipulated categories are going to drop like a rock.
 
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Taryn aka Frank Schilling is battling out Seek and HKDN for gaje.com on NameJet :)
 
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All the accused are somehow doing the same thing on QLQ public domain auctions on NameJet too.
Friends?
Coincidence?
 
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Based on what we have seen in the past, Frank should only have to bid one more time to win.

Donny
 
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Based on what we have seen in the past, Frank should only have to bid one more time to win.

Donny

He was timely saved by this thread. He's not making counter bids from last 24 hours.
 
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Taryn aka Frank Schilling is battling out Seek and HKDN for gaje.com on NameJet :)
Looks like namejet has concluded their investigation, and reported back nothing to it's customers if these parties are still active bidders, or their bids are still active.
 
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Looks like namejet has concluded their investigation, and reported back nothing to it's customers if these parties are still active bidders, or their bids are still active.

What did you expect? The facts speak for themselves. They are complicit in these shill bids. They are not going to find any of these major players guilty. Or to impose any significant bans on any of these users. Their posturing to date, has all been about, damage control. Which is a lost cause.
 
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This is what is wrong in the industry, defending a fraud makes you look just as bad. I almost did a deal with Oliver in the past but the dude was sketchy as f*ck. Like I mentioned before, I been in this business for 20 years, I seen it all, and I can spot a scumbag 1 mile away, and Oliver is a scumbag.

I was just posting my REAL experiences doing ACTUAL business with Oliver. I don't condone shill bidding in any form. I noticed you really think highly of your own opinion and that you have been in the industry for 20 years (you note that in every second post you make).

Another thing I noticed is that you yourself is guilty of highly irregular activity at Namejet. Many would probably put you in exactly the same box as the Booth brothers:

https://www.namepros.com/threads/please-explain-this-to-me-shill-bidding-now-at-namejet-com.848987/

But it makes sense the ones shouting the loudest are often the ones trying to call attention away from their own actions.

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LOL even in that thread you keep telling us many years you been in the industry. Wow you must be some kind of guru and the only person here with experience.
 
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