Is this bot bidding? Should the registrar cancel that auction? Need your opinion

[golan]

I'm not totally sure, that's why ain't calling names in the title.

Long story short, i had this auction and then a guy chimed in and started adding $1 up on my bids in exactly 5 minute intervals. Doesn't matter it was obviously within my proxy, he would just prolong the auction for 5 minutes and add up another $1 in the end. Until he overbid my proxy, then i set new proxy (at 11:24) and he continued. The next time he overbid my proxy it was already too high for me so i quit.

I understand it might be some kind of a tactic to try if i go to sleep or forget to bid etc, but - exactly 5 minutes? I never seen this before.

So we asked their support and were not pleased with their answers:

(proxy??!!)

Regardless whether that was really a bot or not, @Dynadot i call your support staff very unprofessional - the first two reps replying to us didn't even bother to look at the auction logs, and probably they don't know themselves how your proxy bidding works.

So bottom line, that all looked very suspicious. If that was a bot, i think the auction should be cancelled and i should get this domain for $12.99. What do you guys think?

 

[Gube]

It might be a bot; But difficult to proove that with these infos..
And is it forbidden to use a bot to place bids on dynadot ?

 

[golan]

And is it forbidden to use a bot to place bids on dynadot ?

I don't know, that's also a question.

 

[Gube]

They have an api to do it..
So since their api is public; I think it's allowed
https://www.dynadot.com/domain/auction-api.html

 

[Dynadot]

You can use our API to bid on auctions, so it would be possible for a user to write a script to place a higher bid at certain intervals. I am sorry to hear you feel our support team were unprofessional, if you would like to PM us the auction information we can take a look at that to double-check for any shill bidding.

 

[Armageddon]

I'm not totally sure, that's why ain't calling names in the title.

Long story short, i had this auction and then a guy chimed in and started adding $1 up on my bids in exactly 5 minute intervals. Doesn't matter it was obviously within my proxy, he would just prolong the auction for 5 minutes and add up another $1 in the end. Until he overbid my proxy, then i set new proxy (at 11:24) and he continued. The next time he overbid my proxy it was already too high for me so i quit.

I understand it might be some kind of a tactic to try if i go to sleep or forget to bid etc, but - exactly 5 minutes? I never seen this before.

So we asked their support and were not pleased with their answers:

(proxy??!!)

Regardless whether that was really a bot or not, @Dynadot i call your support staff very unprofessional - the first two reps replying to us didn't even bother to look at the auction logs, and probably they don't know themselves how your proxy bidding works.

So bottom line, that all looked very suspicious. If that was a bot, i think the auction should be cancelled and i should get this domain for $12.99. What do you guys think?

As far as i know @Dynadot is one of the most fair on market . Probably some one used API , where you can set max. bid ( did you use also to ? ) so IMO it's all ok