How I won a domain at auction and now it's been stolen back from me | Hacker News Reader

How I won a domain at auction and now it's been stolen back from me

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I disagree with the assertion that rerunning the auction was fair.

> As a result, in fairness to any bidder that was attempting to place a last minute bid

Hey, guess what? If you choose to participate in auction sniping, latency, technical glitches, etc. are a risk you run for not submitting a normal proxy bid ahead of time. If you want to auction snipe, you should be subject to these risk factors - not get a do-over if your snipe was unsuccessful.

Yeah, pretty shady behavior. While the server could have legitimately been down, this is ripe for abuse.

On the bright side, nerdc0re.com is available and might be a good first pass filter for hardcore nerds. =)

And it's not in fairness to the late bidders. Everyone knows well how much the price increases in the last minute.

Enom allows invisible parent accounts to sub-accounts.

Someone could take your domain without any notice at all.

The moment someone gives you a domain in enom you better push it out to another top level enom account (and then maybe even transfer out of enom).

Especially if the account is "created for you".

Is there any more detail / docs on this? Is it common?

Ask any Enom ETP account owner (a top level account that makes a $3000+ deposit, at least that is how much it was back when domains were $6.95).

Your enom account can be manipulated by your ETP owner, unless you are directly under enom (in which case you might be paying $40 for a domain, hence people use ETP parents).

I have access to this feature. You can try the following account on eNom, I don't believe there's any indication I have management access. There's a login link for me to "take control".

User: hnlovesenom

Pass: hnlovesenom

https://i.imgur.com/IGb6SBw.png

> I have never, ever heard of eBay, for example, restarting an auction because it was “unfair” someone couldn’t bid due to eBay’s technical incompetence.

eBay policy is for them to extend auctions that are affected by site outages.

http://ebaystrategies.blogs.com/ebay_strategies/2007/01/ebay... https://www.google.com/search?q=ebay+outage+extend+auction

Extend vs restart 3 days later does not strike me as anywhere nearly the same.

> Please be advised there was an intermittent technical issue with one server during the closing minutes of a few auctions on Saturday, August 2nd. You were involved in one of these auctions,

> As a result, in fairness to any bidder that was attempting to place a last minute bid, we will re-run 3-day private auctions for all participants. All bidders will be included with their last accepted bid amount.

> We will issue a full refund for the domain you won: (...)

> We assure you this is a very rare situation, and corrective measures have been put in place to avoid this happening again in the future.

I don't know. Technical glitches can occur during auctions, I don't think it's necessarily improper of them to repeat the auction after the glitches have been fixed.

If he would have mistakenly put a bid higher than what he wanted would they let him retry?

Only if said glitches were noticed during the auction and you took preventative steps to not notify any winners and explained the situation immediately to all participants.

After announcing a winner and accepting money the deal is done!

> hit me on Twitter (@jm)

You win some you lose some, I guess.

If the shoe were on the other foot, and you lost out on a domain due to their technical glitch I'm sure there would also be uproar.

[Funny how their downtime actually brings in more money]

I can't believe that everyone is falling for the "in fairness to any bidder..." ploy. The person who benefits most from rerunning an auction with a glitch is obviously the seller. They have every incentive to rerun an auction if there were any possible issues that would prevent higher bids.

Unfortunately if they are the ones with the domain you want then I don't know of a good way to avoid this.

I don't think this can be done legally by enom. Domain registrars have to abide by certain rules in order to be able to register/transfer domains etc. If they break these rules they could lose their authority to be involved entirely.

I would suggest investigating what those rules actually are and report them to the main authority that handles .com registration. Since it was registered officially to you in whois, and you did pay, to my understanding that constitutes a valid ownership of the asset in question also.

Even if the rules say they can do it, since you paid, since you "got" the asset, and since you could have transferred the domain out before this occurred, I think you could legally sue in small claims court to have the domain returned to you.

They screwed him for sure. I bet they got a bit more money from the "resale" too. Threaten them with court action because their terms specifically spell out the scenario in question.

The $40 renewal fee on a dotcom seems to indicate that the poster was set up with a 'reseller' account and that some price gouging was at play, regardless of the circumstances around the auction. The parent of a reseller account decides the price of domain purchases and collects the difference between the parent account's actual cost for the domain (depending on whatever fees _their_ parent charges them..) and the cost that the reseller paid.

On my eNom reseller account, I pay $9.45 to renew a dotcom domain, and I believe that my parent is taking at least $1 per domain out of that fee (at least, they were 10 years ago when I first received my account).

It's likely that NameJet are the parent company if this account was setup with eNom on the poster's behalf due to an auction with them. It looks like they skim another $30+ off of each sale this way, if this was a 1 year renewal instead of a 4 year..

File a trademark for Nerdcore and then file an ownership dispute with WIPO against the new owner. Just kidding, but I lost a domain that way. The domain system is a mess and unless you have strong intellectual property ownership behind the name you should assume you could lose it at any time.

Looks like NameJet is based in Washington state based on their About Us page. So give what happened and the low value involved, I'd suggest two things (I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice) look at contacting Washington State's consumer protection board[1] and the Better Business Bureau [2] for the state. They might not take up the issue, but this does seem like something that would likely violate some state bases consumer protection law.

[1] http://www.atg.wa.gov/Divisions/ConsumerProtection.aspx#.U-O... [2] http://www.bbb.org/alaskaoregonwesternwashington/

I guess a good lesson is to always take it away from eNom...

Yeah that was high on my list of things to do (even with paying for another year), but they "auction lock" domains for some number of days after winning (I'm guessing in person-to-person transfers they want to make sure it's legit).

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/name-holder-faqs-2012-...

    If I bought a name through one registrar, am I allowed to switch to a different 
    registrar?

    Yes. The Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy, applicable to all ICANN-accredited 
    registrars, provides that registered name holders must 
    be able to transfer their domain name registrations 
    between registrars. You must wait 60 days after the initial 
    registration or any previous transfers to initiate a transfer.

This applies to ownership changes too, you would not have been able to transfer for 2 months.

Very interesting. I wonder if they're breaking that provision or if there's some backhanded interpretation of it that they're using.

EDIT: Whoops, re-read that again. Yep, that makes sense. I think "auction lock" is like 42 days. Like I said, locking it makes sense to avoid baddies getting hold of your domain easily.

In this case, the baddies just happened to be eNom.

Why would OP have taken a screenshot of the whois prior to the second auction? "brazenly been stolen "?

Come on...

If they have an explicit policy granting rights to winners of auctions, there's something, but otherwise, they are likely close enough to the bounds of any externally binding regulatory policies for it to not matter.

Did you take part in the second auction or just walk off the field in protest? You can't win if you don't play and just because they didn't explicitly describe all possible outcomes for unforeseen issues, you feel they have no ground to do as they want? Just because they didn't say this was a possibility doesn't mean it's not in their purview to do it.

Caveat emptor always for everything not explicitly granted to the emptor in the contract.

> I’ve now had a piece of property I purchased taken from me

While I think that the way the auction went down sounds rotten as all hell, you do not purchase a domain. You lease/rent it for a period of time.

Technically sure...but playing the semantic game, find me a registrar that advertises the ability to purchase a domain as "renting".

The distinction between purchase and rental is irrelevant here. A rental is a purchase of certain rights for a period of time, and generally doesn't allow for "take-backs" any more than a purchase of ownership. If you rent an apartment for 1 year, your landlord can't come back several days after you moved in and say "Sorry, I changed my mind, I'm taking my apartment back and renting it to someone else" unless the rental agreement specifically allows for that.

(Source: renter's rights informational websites & literature specific to my area of residence. IANAL.)

I have a feeling the agreement the fine fellow who authored the article agreed to just such a possibility.

He purchased the lease/rent of NameJet. They doesn't own it either.

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