Ask HN: Is Godaddy Running a Scam? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Godaddy Running a Scam?

80 pointsbitlad56 comments

Recently, I was trying to a buy a domain for which we had bid in Godaddy. We bid the suggested price in Godaddy. Our bid was rejected buy the owner.

That peaked my curiosity to check who actually owned the website.

When we ran whois on the domain. The name that pops up is Wild West Domains, LLC [http://www.wildwestdomains.com]

When you look further, Godaddy's CEO is the CEO of Wild West Domains. Lot of the staff are part of this LLC.

Just wondering what is it all about?

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Wild West Domains is a subsidiary of GoDaddy. They are basically he same company, and the Whois doesn't usually show the owner of the domain anymore, it shows the company that's keeping the owner's information private. WWD and GoDaddy both offer this service. Lookup other domains, you'll see the same thing all over the place. The whois on just about all of my domains say Wild West Domains, the others are GoDaddy or Namecheap, my personal information never comes up anymore because I opt for the privacy options.

I recommend using a cheaper, better service that includes free whois privacy by default such as Dynadot.

Did you pay ~$50 to place the bid?

If so, and if you can be bothered to complain hard enough, they'll usually refund you. They know that they're running a scam.

It could be worse. They've been known to snipe domains from under the noses of their users, and their recently closed "domain backorder" service was an almost insultingly blatant scam -- a sort of "free money hack IRL" where they were taking advantage of rubes -- it never worked.

> it never worked.

That's not strictly true. I used it a long while ago on a vanity domain just to see if it would work. It did. They snagged the domain for me.

Wow, this is the first I've ever heard of it working. I don't suppose you can share more details on the domain? (TLD, length, etc.)

GoDaddy was always scam, I bought a domain like 15 years ago and they had same mindset back then.

Just look at the names; “Go Daddy” and “Wild West”.. It’s alarming already.

I’ve always been of the belief that it was intended as GodAddy but the owner backed off of this as it seemed too egotistical, narcissistic, or blasphemous.

You obviously don't know Bob Parsons that started godaddy, he was very much all of those things. I had the joys of working with the lunatic at godaddy as an early employee in the first few hundred when he was still active in the company daily in 2003, and left after the superbowl explosion in business a few years later because he was such a personal nutbag to work with directly.

It started as Jomax Technologies, I believe.

Why is it we can’t use any DNS service by now? I want to use a completely alternate list that has the main domains like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and whoever wants to list, but doesn’t register everything like the global DNS system.

Seems silly we deify one DNS pay to play scheme when we can easily point to alternate DNS. As it stands the world has a naming scheme monetized and owned through no merit or logic based system, just entrenchment.

.onion kind of does this with privacy. .eth (ew) kind of does too, but critical mass is unlikely.

alternative roots exist but they will not be taken seriously by operating system vendors (for damned good reasons that are touched on by RFC 2826 - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2826).

You're free to use alternative roots. This doesn't quite address the structure of domain registration (the ICANN regime, perhaps?) because that's a different thing altogether, but kind of related. kind of.

I personally do not want to live in a world where there are competing roots. You would have massive fragmentation, confusion, poisoning, spoofing, severe trust issues. It's not going to happen.

EDIT: oh shit, it actually is happening. sad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Internet_Law

Anyone can set up a DNS provider, browsers make it easy to specify an alternate IP address. A pihole for instance has a list of domains it black holes to provide ad blocking etc, NSA provides “Protective DNS” to government contractors that refuses to resolve known malicious domains (via Akamai Govshield [0]), trick is getting anyone to use it. You’re not wrong about entrenchment being the main factor but hey, it ain’t called a network effect for nothin’ !

[0] https://www.nsa.gov/About/Cybersecurity-Collaboration-Center...

Global consensus on naming is pretty valuable. Nobody big is going to use an alternate root, especially an alternate root that potentially conflicts with the ICANN root.

There have been alternate roots, with alternate TLDs, but adoption is nearly zero. .onion works a little bit because it's part of TOR. I'm not convinced .eth works, but maybe it's somewhat viable???

For everything else, a mediocre domain name can usually be found at low cost, and if it's too much, there are many domains that offer free subdomains, although you might not like the neighborhood.

.onion is an RFC 6761 Special-Use top-level and is described more fully in RFC 7686. It's probably not to be described as part of an alternate DNS root system.

Godaddy is a sham, but not a scam. This is normal behavior for a domain registrar. It's called Privatized Whois.

GoDaddy registered a domain name and put up a "for sale" banner within three minutes of me searching for it on their site some years ago.

I don't know if they still do it. But there were so many similar stories in the past. That's why I adopted domain checks using whois/rdap before registering. Their search interface is used only for price comparison using bogus second level domains.

You should never look up potential domain names at the big registrars. Or most registrars. Or any registrars. They'll buy it out from under you if it generates enough attention. They know exactly how many people looked up $coolnewthang.xyz and they know the bidding offers. THEY have to register it for you.

Somebody at Godaddy probably did this before you thought of the domain in the past, which is why its in their network and rejecting bids. It knows the incoming bids. It's sitting on it until someone like you came along.

I use porkbun, no idea if they've stayed course in honesty but I believe so.

Also if you're looking at GoDaddy era webhosts, they all own most of the market. Bluehost, Hostgator (EIG), etc are all grouped with a ton of other webhosts for that low end $10 market.

So, stay away from those.

Registrars are a scam, too. And stupid tlds.

> They'll buy it out from under you if it generates enough attention.

Is there actually evidence of this happening? I always thought this was an urban legend.

There a comment or tweet by the Namecheap CEO saying that something like this would be so obvious and a breach of trust that this would cause more damage to any registrar than making some money on a domain sell. Not worth it.

Happened to me with a registrar whose name I can no longer remember. And yep, dropped them like a hot potato.

Waited the cancellation period (I think it was 5 or 7 days for a registrar to cancel a registration back in those days) and the domain became available (from a different registrar).

Webhosting is one of the most scammy shitty industries. I worked in it for 15 years. Do not give that industry any sort of benefit of the doubt. There are good companies but there are a lot of not.

Steps to verify

1. go to GoDaddy

2. search for a bunch of domain names that are loosely plausible but also so niche no one really wants them. Make sure you find a bunch of ".com" that are not registered

3. come back a week later. I can guarantee you one is now registered.

I look up potential domains from ICANN for fear of getting the domain sniped: https://lookup.icann.org/en

I'm not actually sure that they are not involved in sniping, or even that others are involved. But it's my best bet on it.

I has one experience with them when backordering domain.

Godaddy domain business is like you make a backorder to buy domain. Someone immedidetely will buy domain when it becomes available and it automatically gets listed on Godaddy auctions. I think its planned something fishy.

it seems like it is much deeper than I thought - https://x.com/kchironis/status/1607496457942335489

Are you sure that’s not just the domain privacy setting being enabled?

I think it is not related to domain privacy. More I dig, it seems like it is a different entity somehow related to Godaddy, where in they are acting as a broker as well as seller. This kind of behavior might be fraudulent in other industries but apparently it is not in domain marketplace.

What's the scam exactly? WWD is a GoDaddy subsidiary, either GD owns the domain or is acting as the broker.

We think GD owns the domain. If they are advice a price, and that price was the bid price, isn't it funny that they are rejecting our bid to somehow indicate that we should pay more.

Thats the scam. They are acting both as broker and seller without transparently revealing the relationship.

It is like, you go to buy a house, the broker says the advertised price is 2 million, i recommend paying 3.2 million and then you realise the broker was the owner of the house.

But in this case, the bid was rejected. If GoDaddy wanted $75, why wouldn't they just suggest $75 and accept the bid, instead of suggesting $50 and rejecting it? Seems less efficient to play this game. Maybe I'm missing something.

And, even if they accepted the bid, I don't see the issue of not disclosing who owns it. Anyone who is selling something is 'suggesting' (setting) a price, so it wouldn't really matter if they disclosed they owned it or not because they are free to set the price. Why would you care if they owned it or not?

Do I understand this correctly? Maybe someone has a bridge they want to sell me

Generally in bid, if your price get rejected, you would bit for higher price and that's what we did, till you discover the price. I think with lower price they hook you in. The true price is sometimes 2x-10x of what they suggest.

Their bidding mechanism is not how a retail transaction works, where either you buy or you don't, it is not binary.

When was GoDaddy ever not a scam?!

Dark patterns abound. Maybe not a scam, but some deal of white collar fraud.

I'd call it a scam. And I think most people would say it is at least a little unethical.

Whether it is legal or not is an entirely different question.

The company was always bad, but took a nosedive around the time their CEO was found killing elephants for sport 15 years ago.

The fact that people are still using them is disappointing.

———-

also for pedantry’s sake, it’s “piqued” your curiosity

My employer registers their domain with GoDaddy. Laughably, the cert expires on the dot every year and I get the "site is not secure" warning in browser like clockwork. Doesn't renew until I send an email to the "admin" notifying them of this; they tell me to click through warnings and continue as normal--rube shit

Wonder how much they pay to register each year? Brought it up to MGMT but they are equally clueless

Don't use GoDaddy? (I'm a hypocrite, I have a couple dozen domains but there are a couple I haven't yet transferred out of their system).

Yes, Godaddy are definitely frauds. They steal domains, me and several people I know have experienced this, and the internet is full of similar stories

I had a friend that also lost the domain name for their small business when Godaddy sold it from under them.

The process was:

* They missed the expiration warning (their fault)

* On the date of expiry, Godaddy immediately "sold" the domain name to a subsidiary called Afternic

* Once there, it was auctioned off to a company that forwards traffic to an Indonesian gambling site

No amount of phone calls, emails or any customer support could get their domain back. They suggested the domain could be re-claimed by going through a Godaddy broker, but the cost was extortionate and even though they were willing to pay, it still didn't go through (I don't have those details).

A customer-friendly approach to a domain expiry with no email response would be to deactivate the DNS records for a week before taking further action. Any active domains would notice the mistake pretty quickly and remedy it. The immediate on-sale of the domain is a pure cash-grab with no care given to customers.

Someone has described a similar experience here: https://drawne.com/godaddy-afternic-scam/

In this case, the solution is to always make sure your DNS contact email address is operating, but these people were not IT professionals and their configuration mistake cost them a huge part of their business.

Concur with everyone else. It’s a scam. I could explain all the scams they run but to save you time: it’s a scam, never ever ever use them. Your life will be so much better.

GoDaddy is the only web-host to have ripped me off around $400 due to dark patterns and god-awful customer service resolution. I would never go anywhere near them again.

Did you make a bid in an auction or place the minimum offer? Anyone can list their domains for sale on godaddy with a minimum offer and optionally a buy it now price.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_privacy

Any company with 'Wild West' in their name is surely playing by the rules. Right?

Or based out of Arizona, home of Tombstone and the OK Corral.

Bad service for good money is a scam. Stay away would be my best advice.

lol they don't even offer good discounts/good money compared to their competitors and charge/upsell you with rediculous stuff like privacy protection which should be their responsibility, ssl certificates and what not

When don't they run scams? NEVER DO BUSINESS WITH GODADDY.

If GoDaddy is involved it is invariably a scam

Godaddy has always seemed like a scam to me.

WWD is part of Godaddy

Not a scam, just related businesses. There aren't too many scams in the domain business (I'm sure somebody will point out a few in the comments. Schroedinger's law, I think it is?) because it's governed by ICANN and fishy business will lose a registrar their accreditation.

Godaddy has a special reputation on HN and among the tech community in general. I can narrate a few examples that I'm personally aware of, but that's besides the point. But to say that there are not many scams in the DNS business is a bit of stretch. There have been allegations of conflict of interests even in case of ICANN.

The core issue is that DNS is a money factory that exists because of their first mover advantage and incumbency factor. There is no other reason why someone else couldn't have been in charge. It's like those academic publishers in the age of the internet (though they had legitimate reasons to exist before the internet). Their justification for existence is that they already exist. Such systems are ripe for exploitation and corruption. And there is no reason someone won't do it when they get a chance.

A naming system is necessary and a centralized naming system is certainly costly to maintain. But, we could have sacrificed the centralized control in favor of low cost of operation and virtually free identities. (The sacrifice is due to Zooko's triangle). The identities won't be that easy to remember - but we already have a similar system where that issue is solved. We have nearly random phone numbers that we map to pet names in our contacts list. It would have avoided another avenue of unnecessary economic exploitation on the internet.

Yeah based on the downvotes I got I'm understanding that this is an unpopular opinion. Truth is, I've been in the web hosting business for over 25 years and the number of actual domain name related scams that I've personally seen are very very low. Perhaps I just don't eat sleep and breath DNS enough.

And I mean sure, godaddy sucks. I get it. I don't use them. But a customer of mine has all his domains there, and it just works. That doesn't make them better in my eyes. I work with people who helped build godaddy- and yes, we giggle and rudely point at them for what they've become. But a scam? That's a stretch to me. and what the OP posted about was not a scam.

What OP described here does sound like it's a domain privacy measure, rather than a scam. But Godaddy is known to register domains that their customers search for, and then offer it on auction - at least in the past. They also demonstrated some fine-print policy by which they hold hosted data hostage to force a steeper renewal fee. (Not me. I wouldn't host anything other than DNS records with my registrar - even though I trust mine much more than Godaddy). I don't know why they won't count as scams. But they are red flags enough for me to stay well away.

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