Yes, I've had truly bad experience with Godaddy. I am new to domaining and made the lamest of errors, late last year. I was contemplating a domain I wanted for a few weeks. It was an unusual .ai domain and was available. I was thinking if it looks so good to me why hasn't anyone taken it yet and waited for a few days thinking it is unusual so noone is going to grab it. It was still available with my trusted old registrar when I checked after those few days. I do not want to name my other registrar as I am not trying to promote another company here. Next thing I know, tragically, I was toying with Godaddy's free domain appraisal tool and just typed in this domain. Yes, I feel like going back in time and kicking myself he-he! Within a matter of hours the domain got taken and, sure enough, was registered via NameCheap and parked on ParkingCrew. If you search, you'd find a lot of people have faced similar issues in the past. They searched on Godaddy and somehow the domain got picked up from right under their noses and took a similar route.
Unfortunately, new users on most forums are not allowed to post such things. I could not post about it in other forums. Is it possible they did not do it? Sure, I mean it is certainly possible. Any domain can get registered at any time. However, given the domain, the circumstances and the timing, the odds are someone or a script could be looking at appraisal requests and just grabbed it. And when I read about other horror stories, I think it is highly likely. I faced another minor issue at Marcaria where my search for a domain hack in a rare ccTLD got taken up by the same registrar within a day only to be parked. I know, it could be any person who just found it, and I don't blame them here since I had the chance to register and I waited a day as this extension was not cheap. I've otherwise had very good experience with them.
Again, I know none of this is practically provable. And I cannot say companies condone such activities. My point here is how do these companies check against such practices by rogue employees? What kind of systems, checks and policies do they have to prevent such sniping? I truly feel this happens, just not as frequently now as it used to, perhaps.
