DropCatch.com is troubled by lots of "potentially fraudulent activity", or bidders bidding up auctions and not paying, where auctions have to be re-run as a result.
I get emails from dropcatch all the time saying "
due to complications involving potentially fraudulent activity, the following auctions you had participated in are being restarted".
The cannamarket.com auction has already ended three times (!), and been restarted two times, because the first two winners didn't pay up. However, the last time the auction ended, for the third time, is 5 days ago, and the name has still not been paid for, so I wouldn't be surprised if they have to restart the auction once more, and run it a fourth time... The win is certainly past the auction payment deadline, and the name has still not changed WHOIS to reflect the winner, which happens immediately upon payment. So there has been at least two "fraudulent activity" non-payment wins for the name, and it's looking like the third win is not going through either. Will they really run the auction a fourth time if the third winner turns out to be a fraudulent bidder too? This kind of scenario is playing out over and over at DropCatch.
DropCatch.com is just like a game of hot potato where bidders bid up a auctions and don't pay. There is just an unbelievable amount of auctions being restarted due to winners not paying up, and I have not seen this king of thing on any other pre-release or dropcatching platform. DropCatch is clearly not taking serious enough measures to vet their bidders, or not doing enough when they catch people engaging in fraudulent bidding. The amount of auctions that have to be re-run due to fraudulent bidding is just unbelievable. Who knows how many times these "fraudulent bidders" have driven up prices for legit bidders that pay up? There are simply far more re-auctions on dropcatch than on any other platform.
@DropCatch Support has ignored and avoided questions about this and other "challenging" dropcatch.com issues in the past, and there is no transparency about what they do when they discover fraudulent bidding. A fraudulent bidder may have driven up the price in a number of different auctions before getting discovered/banned, and it seem they do not address this retrospectively in any way. They just re-run auctions until they finally get a winner that pays up. Considering how many auctions have to be re-run, I don't know if they even ban these bidders, and if they do, they make it back onto the platform anyway, because there are endless re-auctions due to fraudulent bidding activity. I feel less "safe" bidding on DropCatch than I do on any other domain auction platform, because they are having so many issues with fraudulent bidding activity.
If dropcatch is not able to stop fraudulent bidders from winning in their auctions over and over again for dropcaught in-house names, how are they going to be able to stop coordinated shill bidding where private sellers can directly benefit from engaging in shill bidding? As long as they are having major issues weeding out fraudulent bidding activity on expired domains auctions, I think there is a high risk that they are not going to be able to stop shill bidding and coordinated unnatural bidding activity that aims to drive up the price in private seller auctions. Some of the shill bidders that got banned from NameJet are probably going to be selling at DropCatch instead now. I hope DropCatch has taken and will take adequate steps so that they don't end up facilitating another shill bidding scandal.