Whats going on at Afternic? (1 Viewing)

I'm trying to figure out what's going on, why was the account closed?

Judging by the tweet, someone listed and sold a name that didn't belong to them.

Must be pretty clear in the Terms of Service that you can't do that

Spex said:

dn't belong to them.

Must be pretty clear in the Terms of Service that you can't do that

Click to expand...

So in my experience, this is what happens:

1. Someone lists a domain they legit own as for sale on a marketplace.
2. Someone sells that domain on another marketplace, or more likely drops said domain, which gets registered again.
3. Marketplaces are run by morons who only look out for themselves and not their marketplace. As such, they don't give a crap about anything but sales and profits. So they never purge old listings, they don't require continuing proof of ownership, they don't watch whois for changes in registrar or registrant, they don't verify the ownership of a domain BEFORE they collect the funds from the buyer, they don't respond to complaints from new owners about taking down old listings showing an out of date BIN price that's not even in their own account.
4. Then someone else buys the domain on the marketplace it shouldn't be listed on.
5. Marketplace collects money without even checking if the domain is actually for sale and is actually owned by the listing account.
6. After multiple irate emails from a buyer who paid but never received, marketplace finally decides to look into it.
7. Marketplace bans old owner because they can't be bothered to investigate properly, where if they had, they'd realize this was really their own fault for running a shitty marketplace to begin with.

That's what happens. And I'd bet that's what happened here.

Anyone pick up on my feelings over marketplaces? Dan seemed better at first because they didn't have a historical set of outdated and inaccurate data. Starting clean helped their data look much better than the average old school marketplace. But I predict Dan will be circling the drain soon now that Godaddy bought them.

This is a newbie scammer, and sold these for way below market, so it's more like targeted fraud than just forgetting to remove a domain listing.

Had it been "just a mistake" with a long-standing Afternic listing that expired, the penalty would not have been so harsh.