@dande .. Seriously .. what you're talking about is pretty much criminal. It really wouldn't take much for the seller to contact the new buyer after WhoIs change or the site goes live. While it's certainly something somebody could hide short term, longer term is very different.
They are a MULTI-BILLION dollar company .. do you really think they're going to do something illegal and risk going to jail over 100k?
After seeing and reporting soooooo many bugs and issues at GoDaddy I'm fairly confident the erroneous "receipt" was simply due to EXTREMELY sloppy email logic.
Note that I am
NOT saying that GoDaddy should or should not ultimately be held responsible (particularly IF their TOS said 24 hours and it was 36 hours as the seller stated above). In fact .. that's what the discussion here should actually be.
You are more than justified to question GoDaddy's competence in this instance with regards to platform/email logic. But again .. this constant rush by many people at NP to illustrate GoDaddy as this big evil empire out to INTENTIONALLY and wrongfully steal people's money is simply unfounded and unrealistic. Or at least in this direct way that could easily be verified later between the buyer and seller.
That being said .. at some point the question can be asked if such numerous long-term issues in of itself is an overarching negligence that could be viewed as "intentional ignorance"? I couldn't blame anyone from making that sort of accusation. But I'm pretty sure this, like most issues, comes down to sloppy logic .. which most certainly should not be acceptable from a multi billion dollar company like GoDaddy.
But again .. as I've said many times before .. this sort of thing is unfortunately normal in many larger institutions. And particularly when it comes to a multi-department giant like GoDaddy, it's almost impossible to expect perfection in such a platform .. but to have the number of issues that it does have also really should not be acceptable.
My stating what happened technically in my view is actually still a very serious issue .. it's something that should have been obvious and they need to look at the corporate structure that led to the creation of that email template logic. There isn't any real need to go searching for conspiracies and sidetrack the overarching issue that at some point GoDaddy really needs to get their act together on these sorts of things .. that receipt should never ever have been generated the way it was .. and there should have been some sort of error-checking done which would have flagged the transaction the second it was attempted. Then give bonus points if they actually implemented a system that notified all parties involved, but also quickly gave the seller the OPTION of selling at the old price .. AND/OR .. to invite the buyer to buy the domain at the corrected price (particularly after 24 hours after the change .. even if it should really be more like 5 minutes)
All these crazy conspiracy theories take attention away from these REAL issues which REALLY need to be addressed and corrected rather than be swept under the rug or dismissed because it's enveloped by all sorts of crazy and unfounded accusations.
For the most part GoDaddy employees are good people who want to do the right thing. With these sorts of issues it's often not a single person who is to blame, but instead it's a result of poor or inappropriate corporate structure for what is needed to put together parts of a platform that involve multiple departments. I'm sure many of them are just as frustrated as us (although probably not more than the original poster here).