WHC | Re-auction (1.Viewing)

I posed this question to a CIRA rep years ago and they said its not their business to investigate shill bidding. So if an auction house knows your bidding pattern, they can basically push you to your limits with a shill bidder. This person at CIRA said, well, technically they're not breaking any rules as far as their concerned UNLESS they end up winning and keeping the domain. They didn't think shill bidding was right, but that it was something they couldn't police. They're attitude is that the market will decide. So if you agreed to pay $5K in an auction, the fact that you got shilled up to $5K doesn't matter. You agreed to pay it. That's how some places see it. And of course it does piss off people, as you saw with Rick losing his shit a few weeks ago. So if you suspect shill bidding, you have to basically choose not to do business with that company, even though they're very successful in TBR. Its a brutal choice. But that's one of the reasons that we had a TBR player exit the game last year (catchdrop). We all suspected it, and most of us chose to not do business there. They may not have even been guilty, so it is the market perception that is the issue. So if WHC is smart, they'll just restart the auction from scratch and mitigate any suspicions regarding the auction format.

I know one of the domains that WHC will probably auction off was won by that Yusuf guy who was scamming people here, who then tried to convince WHC to do a payment plan, and then failed to make the payments. So they probably got some money out of him, but certainly not all of it. So I won't be surprised when I see that domain in re-auction.

Its a little shocking to me that this would happen very often though. So I'm curious to hear from WHC, what kind of volume of domains are there to re-auction, will this be a yearly one-time auction to clean up the inventory they're not supposed to be keeping? Or will it be a weekly thing?

rlm said:

And I find that if I'm actually interested in a domain, just placing a bid on it early means its going to show up at the top section with only domains you've bid on. That kinda helps solve the sorting problem for the most part.

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That's my whole point, as in order to any re-auction system to work, these domains need to be automatically placed in your "active" list, as they not part of the TBR anymore. It's a Catch-22, unless WHC adds functionality to manually add/delete active auctions.

WHC is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, so they either need to make adjustments to the auction system or run these re-auctions on a different day.

MapleDots said:

Reality is it should be offered to me at my original 2k because any bid made by the new bidder is technically null and void and I could have won the domain at 2k had the bogus bidder not participated.

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The reality is that a system like this just invites mass fraud.

This happened at GD when they adopted a similar format of deleting defaulted bids. Multiple shill bidders started immediately bidding any quality domain into the stratosphere so that no rational bidder would take part in it. Then 3 of the 4 (or 4 of 5, etc.) of the shill would default, leaving the first bidder as the "winner".

There have been documented cases of this happening, and premium domains sold for tiny amounts (like $12), so the only rational way of reselling a defaulted domain is to auction it off a second time, often with restrictions.

Anyone else bidding and wondering who you are bidding against? Are these real bidders. I’d like to know what is happening to people placing bids and not paying.

Stewie said:

Anyone else bidding and wondering who you are bidding against? Are these real bidders. I’d like to know what is happening to people placing bids and not paying.

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Nothing really. They get banned from the platform and lose whatever deposit they made if there was one.