discuss Reasons for Fake Bids & Offers

[sbweb]

I've seen my share of fake bids and offers on various domain marketplace platforms.

Here are some possible reasons for those fake bids/offers:

• Buyers using dummy emails/accounts to bid on domains for research purposes. They want to extract reserve price. Once they have this intelligence, they can use their real email/account to play hardball.
• Shill bidding. This one is probably the most common practice to drive up prices for domain auctions.
• Fake bids. This one confuses me. I've seen ridiculous bids (ie: $1,000,000+) on pigeon doo-doo domains. Also, fake emails being used, so when you reply it bounces. It's obviously not for intelligence gathering... so what is the purpose of this?

Please add to the list if you have any other reasons.

 

[sbweb]

Another one:

• Domain appraisal scams. They submit a high offer and then tell you to you get a domain appraisal through one of their partners.

 

[Chris Hydrick]

Please add to the list if you have any other reasons.

Possibly:

• Price manipulation
• Pump and dump

In 2015 @LucidDomains created a thread asking if a domain pump & dump was possible HERE

I had a weird thought this morning that the certain entities in China are doing a pump and dump scheme. Stock markets, Forex, Bitcoins are all heavily manipulated markets by those with great wealth.

Could it be possible to do that with 4L-5L, 6N-8N domains? Or perhaps what we're seeing it normal, a natural progression of the market.

Anyone thought along the same lines? Or am I comparing apples and oranges?

@Recons.Com responded with an interesting theoretical example of how something of that nature could happen.

Could be...
Think about it. Someone or group of people/companies have extra 2 million to invest. They come with the scheme to register 200K of available 6N dot com (of course, with "better" pattern) and also spread the legends that somehow Chinese make sense out of 6 digit numbers and maybe even talk in numbers.

They know people monitor the number of registrations across sectors, so many people realize there is something is going on and want to jump onto the train. So let's say 10 000 people buy an average of 70-80 6N to complete the scoop. Once the buyout is complete, now people want to buy second hand so now there is a floor and even higher one for "better" pattern.

Now all they have to do is carefully manage the sale of the inventory at average of $200-400 (mind you, they have the better pattern ones) not to crash the market just yet and maybe even manage the non-renewed ones if they still have big inventory in the hands left. So, they need to sell around 7K of the names to renew, another 7K to pay for the original acquisition and 7K more for 100% profit on the invested $2 million. And they still have around 180K names worth on paper around $60 million.