The Friday following Thanksgiving is called Black Friday because it is estimated to be the first day of the year that retailers become profitable or get out of the red, and in to the black. While searching for a good Black Friday website on Google I found a lot of different Black Friday websites that showed advertisements and gave daily updates. I wondered how many websites there were, so I did some domain name digging and found the following statistics:
Continue reading…

A Russian blog reported that an unknown buyer has purchased Russia.com through Sedo for $1.5 million. The whois record indicates that the transfer is in process, a good indicator that the money is in escrow and the deal will close.
Continue reading…

Sedo reported healthy sales last week of 202 domains for a total of $943,205. Sedo’s median sales price remained high at $2467, in part because so many of the single character .BIZ and .DE auctions were completed.
Continue reading…

Rust Consulting has begun e-mailing out the SnapNames rebate offers to all affected customers. I received my e-mail earlier this morning, although it ended up in my Gmail spam folder by mistake. SnapNames customers will have until November 6, 2010 to accept the offer, which is one year from today.
Continue reading…

A detailed look at the whois history of domains won by SnapNames VP of Engineering Nelson Brady shows that he pointed at least one domain to SnapNames DNS servers by mistake, and let a good domain expire.
Continue reading…

Click image for larger PDF

Some gave me a hard time for not including more facts in my previous story that speculated on how the SnapNames scam was uncovered. I admit that my previous article was vague where clear facts would have sufficed. So let me set the record straight and dive into the minutia of whois histories that drove my initial conclusions.
Continue reading…

As I mentioned in my previous article about the SnapNames fraud, iREIT may have purchased a portfolio of domains from Nelson Brady in late 2006. An iREIT spokesperson declined to speculate on the accuracy of my claim, but whois records indicate that a number of domains were transferred from DomainQueue of Tacoma, WA to iREIT in late 2006.
Continue reading…

In an e-mail this morning, SnapNames CEO Jeff Kupietzky and general manager Craig Snyder notified SnapNames customers that an ex-employee was involved in up to 5% of auctions between 2005 and 2007. They have also announced a reimbursement program for some of the affected customers. Customers who won auctions where the ex-employee is believed to have bid up the price will receive a refund of the difference with interest. I spoke to a SnapNames employee this afternoon who confirmed that the fired employee was in fact Nelson Brady who used the handle ‘halvarez’ when bidding on SnapNames auctions. A photo of Nelson Brady is available on DNjournal here.
Continue reading…