status-resolved Shill Bidding On Forums

[DomainVP]

Take a look at the auction thread for IQTT and PFAN.

Two decent 4L's are being auctioned off in the forum ; $500 and $570 respectively.

That is until another user, with minimal activity, made the following bids :
PFAN $600, IQTT $550.

Upon further inspection, it looks like the account that placed that bid has not been active in 4 months, they have bid on a total of 7 auctions ever, 4 out of 7 were posted by OP.

What is your take on this? A coincidental alignment of seller and buyer, or shill bidding at it's finest. Do you think that this happens often?

 

[wwwweb]

That appears to be the bidders information. The sellers name is: Richard Mathew. Just because they have the same first name doesn't make them the same person. Granted, one of the whois does have Richard Tarjeft listed, the one that hasn't updated (supposedly). All the other domains in the sellers signature are for: Richard Mathew.

I'll look more into this new information to see if anything else matches up.

Thanks,

Check LinkedIn for R-i-c-h-a-r-d T-a-r-j-e-f-t (without dashes) owner and operator of US MLM Leads same as his username from Phoenix AZ

 

[iowadawg]

Entire thread is very interesting to me.
The number of detectives on this forum I did not know.

 

[MasterOfMyDomains]

1 new alert!

status-resolved Shill Bidding On Forums. There may be more posts after this.

 

[wwwweb]

1 new alert!

status-resolved Shill Bidding On Forums. There may be more posts after this.

Under review now again
https://www.namepros.com/posts/5408789/
status-review Shill Bidding On Forums.

 

[Eric Lyon]

Please bear with us as we work more on this situation. We now have multiple members of the team investigating the matter to make sure that all our research is double checked.

Thank you for your patience,

 

[DaveX]

"Richard Mathew" and "Richard Tarjeft" showing up on same Whois for BHK.io

http://nic.io/go/whois/bhk.io

(scroll down to Billing contact to see "Tarjeft")

Nice catch on this one @DomainVP

Same with AHQ.io. From this thread https://www.namepros.com/threads/ll...estments-just-about-gone.931442/#post-5404938

 

[Eric Lyon]

Update:

The duplicate account has now been closed and the seller's marketplace access has been revoked.

Thank you to everyone who helped contribute to the investigation, especially @wwwweb for providing additional research.

One of the benefits of showing usernames and having a completely transparent marketplace is that buyers and sellers can make observations, study behavior, research, report potential fraud, and make informed decisions.

We will continue working on solutions to help combat all types of fraud, but nothing can compare to the community helping.

If you have ideas on how to help prevent it, please let us know. Your ideas could help us stop even more than we already do.

Thanks.