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Banned from GoDaddy Auctions

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Kasti

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Hi there.

Some days ago I was having a 404 error everytime I attempted to login in Godaddy's marketplace, so I sent an email about it and, a day later, they just told me I got perma-banned from godaddy auctions, without pre-warnings and anything. Reason? They won't tell and I don't really know.

Of course when I got banned I started questioning everything I made, because I am that type of person who doesn't think to be right every time, but then I decided to give a look at the Godaddy Membership Auctions Agreement... and I could not find anything I did, really. Obviously, at the end of the agreement Godaddy places the strategic sentence: "... GoDaddy determines your actions may pose a risk to GoDaddy or its members" which makes it even harder for me to understand what I did wrong, and, on the other side, it is a too convenient and easy way for Godaddy to do whatever they want.

Another interesting fact is how nasty they were to "inform me" about my ban. Basically they wouldn't have even informed me if I didn't contact them for my 404 page error. But it's not just that. It is also the way they told me about that, which goes as following:

"Dear XXX,

Thank you for contacting Aftermarket Support.

Your auctions membership has been permanently suspended due to violations of the Auction Membership and Terms of Service. No further information will be provided, the decision is final, and we consider this matter closed.

Regards,

Debran D.
GoDaddy Aftermarket Support"


I like how this email attempts to look like professional but actually it is not at all.
I have never heard of any serious company/platform/whatever perma-banning anyone, without any warning, without any reason. Godaddy is the only exception to this, or more simply, maybe Godaddy is not a serious company to begin with.
But why doing that? Probably Godaddy is either not sure about the legitimacy of his bans and so avoids to give any information at all, or maybe Godaddy is well aware that the reason behind his ban is not morally and ethically acceptable and so again tries to hide everything.

What I mean when I say "they might have banned for not morally and ethically acceptable reasons"?
I have certainly been a weird customer to Godaddy's eyes but, in order for you to understand that I need to tell you my whole story:

Basically from last month, as an experiment, I have been constantly surfing on their marketplace in search of clearly good deals. Exactly... those deals that you find very rarely and that seem too good to be true and, in fact, they are not true.
So what happened? I got a refund, before or later than the 14 max days myth, of each of these too good to be true deals and, especially at the beginning, I was very angry with them for letting these fake sellers list their domains on their marketplace and wasting my time. It's not like I ever insulted anybody because I am not that type of person, but I certainly was a weird or even inconvenient customer.

So why would they ban me?
There are multiple reasons which can be connected to that:
1-They might have derived something wrong with all those refunds. That maybe I was connected to the person who listed those domains or whatever. Still I don't get how would I benefit from it, but there might be a way.
2-I am not an expert about this, but maybe it was just about all those refunds. Maybe they thought I was trying to get refunds on purpose, or i don't really know. Even here I don't know how would I benefit from it.
3-I was an inconvenient customer. I have always wondered what these marketplaces do everytime a very clear and good deal is listed on their marketplace. Would the market itself respect the first come first served rule? What if the fake-seller history was an excuse to cover the registrar stealing that deal from you or to favor someone else? The fake-seller story might be true but it is kinda weird. Why would a fake-seller list domains which he is not planning to sell? Compared to the reasons above this might appear more like a conspiracy theory, but actually it is the only one that makes perfect sense to me.

Not saying it's 100% one of my hypothesis above because, as I said, I started questioning everything I did. Maybe they actually had a reason to ban me which I didn't even question myself. If that was the case I wouldn't mind atl all to accept that perma ban they gave me.

Anyways, the purpose of this post was to give you some information about Godaddy's way of doing. I think this company deserves this bad review of mine so that they learn how to properly treat their customers next time. You are of course free to judge this company as you like. There are certainly some aspects for which Godaddy is a great company, but on the aspect I discuess above they revealed themselves to be extremely unprofessional.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
If they are/where to good to true why waste your time..........

I am not the biggest Godaddy fan but they don't ban people lightly......highly doubt it is because of the refunds and there is no conspiracy theory - You have done something that broke their ToS and they banned you

Quite a few companies will ban you without warning if you break their ToS - it's nothing unique to Godaddy.......

@Joe Styler
 
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If they are/where to good to true why waste your time..........

I am not the biggest Godaddy fan but they don't ban people lightly......highly doubt it is because of the refunds and there is no conspiracy theory - You have done something that broke their ToS and they banned you

Quite a few companies will ban you without warning if you break their ToS - it's nothing unique to Godaddy.......

@Joe Styler
I honestly think you are too biased to discuss with.
It's not a matter of being godaddy's side or not. Just look at your first line:
I am the bad guy so it's my fault for wasting my time. It's not godaddy's fault for listing not verifed domains or, even worse, for letting known fake sellers list domains that most likely don't even own on their platform.

The fact that few companies will ban without a warning should make reconsider Godaddy's way of doing. Instead you use it to imply I must have done something really unforgivable.
If I had done something really unforgivable I don't think I would have ever created a post about it risking to ruin my reputation. Yeah it's not like I posted so much to have such a reputation to defend, but I can just say it is my only account here.
 
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Paypal and Google are the same, in this sense.
I have nothing to say about Godaddy (in good-bad axis), because I don't deal with them directly.
It is a company to take into account, because it is too big: Many enduser buyers seem to go
to Godaddy directly (I feel so..).

They may not explain their action against you because they may not want to give any hints
to "their enemies". Bad thing about it: you can't defend yourself.
 
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Paypal and Google are the same, in this sense.
I have nothing to say about Godaddy (in good-bad axis), because I don't deal with them directly.
It is a company to take into account, because it is too big: Many enduser buyers seem to go
to Godaddy directly (I feel so..).

They may not explain their action against you because they may not want to give any hints
to "their enemies". Bad thing about it: you can't defend yourself.
Thing is that they could just explain why they banned without, at the same time, going into details. Also, in some cases it doesn't really make sense to not give any hint. For example if I didn't respect a purchase why wouldn't you just tell me I didn't respect it? How that hint would help me to do anything?

Now that I think about purchases let me say something more.
When I said that I got refund for everything it was a bit inaccurate. I am still waiting for 3 very big domains to be given or most likely refunded, and almost a month has passed since I bought them. I contacted them multiple times and they told me to wait some days, but nothing happened and, as I said, almost 30 days have passed. Is this a normal behavior? I feel like Godaddy Auctions Agreement spends too much time saying what customers cannot do and what Godaddy can do. For example I am trying to find how long they are legally supposed to keep a domain without giving any refund but I am not finding anything in the godaddy auctions agreement. Maybe I have to check better.
 
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That kind of email is a rare email. We normally give people another chance. This is one we send because something is going on and we do not want to do business with you again. There are various reasons for this, but we will not tell you exactly why. That is our policy. Godaddy is not making any kind of judgement on you as a person or what happened. We are simply saying we no longer will do business with you.
 
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That kind of email is a rare email. We normally give people another chance. This is one we send because something is going on and we do not want to do business with you again. There are various reasons for this, but we will not tell you exactly why. That is our policy. Godaddy is not making any kind of judgement on you as a person or what happened. We are simply saying we no longer will do business with you.
I like this funny concept that since a certain thing is in your policy, it's written in your agreements, terms of use or whatever then it must be accepted no matter what. How can I know if I was banned for a proper, even if small, reason or you, just to make an example, decided to ban me for spending too much time on live chat support? Punishing should also mean educating. And by giving no reason at all you are not educating at all.

"we will not tell you exactly why" is a joke, isn't it? It's not like you told me anything so far.

"There are various reasons": now I am even more sure that you are making everything up. I could have missed or underestimated one thing but I highly doubt that happened for more things.

At this point my suspicions that for certain domain names you compete with customers do only increase. You are not transparent at all and if this kinda of policy is unknown to big companies there must be a reason.
If a big company like Godaddy prefers not to state any reasons because afraid of being legally disputed by a person with much less economic power, that clearly means you are not confident at all of winning the dispute. It says it all.

You might not judge me as a person but I do judge your way of doing. You just came here to defend the company you represent and say literally nothing new. You could not say anything in the first place, instead you decided to spawn here like a mushroom just to take the presence, just for the appearence, which by no suprise is the most suited adjective I can give to Godaddy, an old dinosaur which keeps going on only for what done in the past, with crazy renewal prices made only to take advantage of higher than average ignorant customers.
 
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I think a non-paying bidder would be the top most reason. Besides that, i'm not sure. I've bought numerous GD closeouts through the years... never got banned. But then again, I've won GD expired domains that were "too good to be true" as well.

But I always paid, and i have been refunded when there have been errors (probably more than 5 times total).. and I'm still not banned because of that lol.

I feel like, if you always honor your end of the deal, they won't really ban you. But if you try to "cheat" the system by conveniently not paying when you realize hte domain is bad.... that's a different story.
 
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I think a non-paying bidder would be the top most reason. Besides that, i'm not sure. I've bought numerous GD closeouts through the years... never got banned. But then again, I've won GD expired domains that were "too good to be true" as well.

But I always paid, and i have been refunded when there have been errors (probably more than 5 times total).. and I'm still not banned because of that lol.

I feel like, if you always honor your end of the deal, they won't really ban you. But if you try to "cheat" the system by conveniently not paying when you realize hte domain is bad.... that's a different story.
Thanks for your answer!

I can exclude to have made such a mistake, even accidentally, because I have never bid on godaddy's marketplace. And, as you certainly know, to apply the 'buy now' option the payment is necessary.
Moreover I wouldn't ever do on purpose such things. If I did the ban would be deserved and I wouldn't have made such post.

About the refunds I think I had about 30 of them in just one month... and as a consequence I spent a lot of time in live support chat to ask for information when too many days had passed for each purchased product. I don't think all that time spent chatting with the support was one of the various reasons I got banned, but at this point I have doubts about everything.
 
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30 refunds in a month?? LOL! There's your reason.
 
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30 refunds in a month?? LOL! There's your reason.
Yeah that is very weird and might appear as very suspicious... but still how can that thing be exploited to do anything bad? Or maybe the investigation process behind it had a relevant cost and I was generating too many? Still all those investigation processes would have occurred anyways once another buyer took those deals...
 
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I'm pretty sure refunds cost money. Customers with daily refunds are bad business.
 
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I'm pretty sure refunds cost money. Customers with daily refunds are bad business.
I'm not an expert so you may be right. It would make sense since some money generally go away for each transaction.
Still with me banned they will have to refund someone else. So it's not like it will change anything to them from the economic aspect.
 
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About the refunds I think I had about 30 of them in just one month... and as a
30 refunds in just one month?!
Wow! Just wow!
They should've banned you not just for life, but for several lives ahead.
 
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Forgot to say some days before the perma-ban they completely blocked my account (couldn't even access to my products) asking for a very detailed verification: payment cards, statement from financial institution showing purchase, Identification ID and even a picture of myself with the identification ID were required.
Obviously I passed the verification thing, but when I asked them if something was wrong they said that was a routine check. What a coincidence getting banned some days later... This just to say that sometimes the no-further-explanations-policy can become a just-lies-policy.
And, also, what a nice way to force a customer to send all his data before kicking him out from auctions (I couldn't even access my products!). Wasting my time to collect my data that may be subjected to another security breach of them.

PS: @Josytal I didn't reply your message because I am assuming your comment is an exaggerating joke. If I really was banned for that I would just laugh for days, not that I expect a much more valid reason than that. I am that type of guy that strictly uses BIN on just one marketplace to avoid potential multiple sales, thing that a lot of domainers do not do, so it's very unlikely I missed something much heavier than that to get such a harsh punishment.

PPS: I perfectly understand if you guys don't believe me and you think I must have done something wrong to deserve that (it might be the case, remotely), but if you guys think I really deserve a perma-ban without warnings just for refunds, no offense, but you have no critical thinking and you would have sided with godaddy whatever I said. If I really was banned for that, since Membership Auctions Agreement doesn't say anything about it, Godaddy should have told me to stop doing that. In that case I would have stopped immediately but, as I have already said, other users would have bought those same domains, generating the same refunds, so it wouldn't have changed anything to Godaddy anyways.
 
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Thanks for your answer!

I can exclude to have made such a mistake, even accidentally, because I have never bid on godaddy's marketplace. And, as you certainly know, to apply the 'buy now' option the payment is necessary.
Moreover I wouldn't ever do on purpose such things. If I did the ban would be deserved and I wouldn't have made such post.

About the refunds I think I had about 30 of them in just one month... and as a consequence I spent a lot of time in live support chat to ask for information when too many days had passed for each purchased product. I don't think all that time spent chatting with the support was one of the various reasons I got banned, but at this point I have doubts about everything.

Where were you spending the money to get 30 refunds in a month, and not ever bid on GoDaddy's Marketplace, even once? What kind of refunds are you getting?
 
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Where were you spending the money to get 30 refunds in a month, and not ever bid on GoDaddy's Marketplace, even once? What kind of refunds are you getting?
Hi!

I have never bid on Godaddy by choice. I don't like partecipating at auctions because there is too much competition on it and I believe the margin would be too low, even though I don't really have experience with that.

The refunds essentially came from domains with BIN and enough time to refresh page a lot.
Sometimes there were indeed too good deals to be true, like for example TradeMe.com or TradingHouse.com with 40 dollars BIN each, which I bought.
Of course I knew something was off and that most likely who listed such domains was not the owner or didn't plan to sell them. Still there was a small chance the seller was legit and so I made the purchase.

In the end, as I previously said, not a single one of these purchased domains was succesfully given to me, reason for which I got so many refunds.
The most frequent reason they told me when giving me refund was that the seller did not or no longer did own the domain name.
Sometimes it was a bit more different than that, like: "seller did not meet the quality assurance standards of our order verification team".
 
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OK. That explains it. Thank you. If you consider you have complied with GoDaddy's ToS. I think you can fight it. But it's a demoralizing process because they will never tell you what you have done wrong. And you will be stonewalled 150% of the time. They once took all my approx 380 domains away from me for some trumped up reason and closed my account too. It took 5 appeals before they granted me my domains back and reopened my account. At every decision they said it was final and could not be appealed. It's a very long and very hard slog. Not for the faint-hearted. I wouldn't wish the process on anybody. But you don't have any domains there. So it's easy for you to walk away. Their behavior is not one of a respectable open and fair company, when they won't tell you what ToS rule you have broken. IMHO. I'd give up, if I were you.
 
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OK. That explains it. Thank you. If you consider you have complied with GoDaddy's ToS. I think you can fight it. But it's a demoralizing process because they will never tell you what you have done wrong. And you will be stonewalled 150% of the time. They once took all my approx 380 domains away from me for some trumped up reason and closed my account too. It took 5 appeals before they granted me my domains back and reopened my account. At every decision they said it was final and could not be appealed. It's a very long and very hard slog. Not for the faint-hearted. I wouldn't wish the process on anybody. But you don't have any domains there. So it's easy for you to walk away. Their behavior is not one of a respectable open and fair company, when they won't tell you what ToS rule you have broken. IMHO. I'd give up, if I were you.
Thank you very much for sharing your experience and for giving me some tips!

Actually I have few domains with Godaddy but my whole account is not banned, just the auction part, so yeah my situation is not nearly as heavy as your case.

I am not an expert on the matter but it's hard to even think of a justified reason for removing access permanently to your own domains, which basically are your own money.
The only justified reason that comes to my mind is if you stole all of them and they were certain of it. This clearly wasn't your case though, so why would they do that? It's pretty scary...
 
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My advice would be to remove your current domains out of GoDaddy
 
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My advice would be to remove your current domains out of GoDaddy
Best advice on the thread. If you break the rules you have to deal with the consequences. If you feel unfairly treated then use another company. Business is business.
 
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My advice would be to remove your current domains out of GoDaddy
Actually moving out my domains of Godaddy was my intention even before this case happened, due to Godaddy's high renewal costs. The main reason why few of my domains are still there is because I didn't wanna wait the 60 days lock as a buyer. Of course, after reading your experience, I'll make sure to transfer them out of Godaddy as soon as possible.
 
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