Wait a second -- I've long suspected something "fishy" about the Expired Auctions. I sometimes have no choice but to put in my MAX bid (because I have to run to a meeting and cannot watch the auction until the end. On MANY occasions there was a second bidder who pushed the bid right up to just before my max bid. So I won the auction, but I paid my Max bid. If some fraudulent bidder did this I want to know. It happened too many times to be a coincidence.
Now this is a case where often it's normal. As mentioned previously, often people extend auctions just to give more time to research or think about a domain. In many cases someone will try to decide by a certain price point (like an even $100 for example), assuming most advance "proxy" bids are at a rounded numbers.
Also, 50% of the time your secret "proxy" bid is ultimately revealed if the other bidder's last bid is $5 or less than yours. Because the bid will no longer show (auto), and even more obvious in cases where your final amount was $4 or less above their last bid, then they will see the difference is less than $5 and automatically know there can't be another proxy bid above it.
HOWEVER ... there was a time (unfortunately before I started seriously domaining .. lol), where there was indeed a backdoor that allowed people to actually view the highest "supposedly secret" proxy bid. For example, if you made a proxy bid of $500 .. through this system I could see your $500 bid even if the current bid was $30. Again .. I'm pretty sure this was more the result of sloppy coding and not actual malice .. but without going further into the specifics, it was a huge flaw that effectively completely eliminated the integrity of the auctions. For example, there was nothing stopping someone from bidding up to $499 and making you pay 10x more than you would have. Definitely a great strategy for depleting your competing auction bidders funds.
Again though .. it bugs me that many assume GoDaddy to be this big evil corporation. The problem at GoDaddy is that they have a massive platform with multiple departments .. things get built upon older things .. tweaked .. often with unintended and unforeseen results. Heck .. I've won auctions I didn't bid on .. lost auctions I was the highest bidder on. It boggles my mind how many issues and bugs there are with their platform. A few are a very serious, but most of them are relatively benign or are a pain in the butt. Sometimes they are actually helpful (I used to be able to renew domains up to 42 days after expiration without paying any redemption fees .. unfortunately they actually did ultimately find and close that trick .. lol).
For the most part I think the majority of people at GoDaddy genuinely want to do the right thing and have things as fair as possible for as many as possible. But at the end of the day sometimes they need to choose between two non-perfect choices ... sometimes people make mistakes .. and as I think is the biggest problem at GoDaddy: sometimes in big organisations the right hand does things while having no clue how it affects the left hand.
I could go on for ages .. but I've kinda given up on the dream of GD ever being a perfect bug-free platform. I've written so many lengthy emails to my rep over the years about bugs and other issues ... each time it's the standard "thanks for reporting the issue .. it will be given to the proper department" .. and then ... silence. It actually got to the point where I would sometimes start my email to my rep by apologising .. lol. For a while I was probably the biggest pain in the ass customer because I kept finding so many bugs.
But these days I'm more in a put-up or shut-up mode ... GD will always have issues and bugs .. and being a big company most people will just sweep them under the rug or pass it on like a hot potato to the next person. It's not ideal or good .. but it's not evil .. they aren't out to cheat domainers unfairly out of our money (anyways .. in the end we spend all our money with them either way .. lol) .. it's just one of those things that are a fact of life with big bulky multi-department companies or organisations. Fact is .. they have the best expiring domain auctions and you can get good domains cheaper than anywhere else ... at the end of the day that in itself has to count for a lot .. and is ultimately why I'm their client.
On a positive note, a couple of weeks ago my rep invited me to be one of a few people chosen to help their development team with some possible changes to their platform (not sure which part yet). I've done it before .. and as I said .. many of you would be surprised at how genuinely the people at GoDaddy in general want to build a better ship for all of us. That being said .. just a couple of bad apples could do a significant amount of damage (and for that let me be VERY clear that I'm VERY grateful to some of the NamePros members who regularly dig deep into such issues looking for patterns that reveal fraud) .. so I'm not saying there is no evil at GoDaddy .. just that in general the vast majority are good people with good intentions who want to do things in the most ethical way possible.