Dynadot

Namesilo Expired Auction Irregularities

Spaceship Spaceship
Watch

darb

Established Member
Impact
44
I came across what I will call a highly desirable dot com in the Namesilo expired auction list and proceeded to submit a bid on it towards the end of the auction. A bidding war with another person (or bot) ensued and I submitted a bid for $36 and then watched and waited for the 5 minute counter to tick down. It did count down to zero and I proceeded to refresh the screen which resulted in a screen indicating both no new bids and that "This auction has expired." See the attached link to screen shot NS2 below; I do not have a namepros paid account and can't seem to insert images into posts.

From past experiences with the Namesilo expired auctions, I have learned that one needs to take a screen shot of auctions as I would estimate that about a third of the expired auctions that I have won where there is not active counter bidder fail to transfer automatically into my account.

Believing that I had won the auction and that it had ended, I went to bed. Upon checking my email the following morning I had an email notification that the auction was won by another bidder.

Looking at the final auction page one will notice some irregularities: (See the attached link to screen shot NS1 below)

On three separate occasions, two bids of the same amount by the same bidder were accepted by Namesilo.

The winning bid was accepted 5 minutes and 1 second past my bid of $36. Each new bid resets the countdown timer by 5 minutes and the auction is supposed to end if no news bids are submitted within that time frame.

So there are proven issues with the Namesilo auction software and apparently there is auction bidding software that is able to submit multiple bids of the same amount and submit bids past the 5 minute closure.

Obviously I am disappointed/pissed with losing the domain name, I would have proceed with the bidding to a much higher amount, had I had known that I had not won.

Instead of dealing with this privately with Namesilo, I decided to take this to the community so that others that may have experienced similar problems can step forwarded and hopefully get resolution to the problem.

Screen shots:

Screen shot NS1 - https://freeimage.host/i/HUetmF

Screen shot NS2 - https://freeimage.host/i/HUebzg
 
2
•••
The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
In response to NS:

#1) Any auction software should only accept one bid at one amount then close off any further bids until the next increased increment. What if your software accepted two bids of the same amount from different people for the winning bid? Either a weakness or an exploit.

#2) You acknowledge that the auction closes after 5 minutes; LOOK at the last two of the three bids. The third should have never been accepted, as above. A little bit of math shows 5 minutes and one second; by your definition the bid was the winning bid as more than 5 minutes passed. Again, a weakness or an exploit.
 
0
•••
I've been having issues recently too. Elsewhere I posted about how I was charged the renewal fee for a domain I won, but the owner managed to renew *after* I'd won the auction - so they got to keep the domain and yet my funds were taken for their domain renewal. I did get a refund eventually but no explanation.

Many times I've won an auction and then get an email an hour or more later saying they've now renewed it (even though the FAQ implies they only have until before the end of it), plus nearly every decent name gets renewed in the final moments anyway so bidding in these auctions begins to feel futile.
 
Last edited:
0
•••
Back