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GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers
An anonymous reader writes "A GoDaddy Vice President has been caught bidding against customers in their own domain name auctions. The employee Adam Dicker isn't just any GoDaddy employee; he's head of the GoDaddy subsidiary that controls the auctions.
Dicker won some of the domains he bid for, and pushed up the bid price on auctions he didn't win. The conflict of interest is unethical, but could this practice also be illegal? Said a representative for a competitor, 'Even if controlled, that practice has bad news written all over it.'
This comes hot on the heels of news that despite earlier promises to ICANN to end their 60-Day ban on transfers, GoDaddy quietly circumvented it by forcing customers to agree to the ban anyway. ICANN doesn't appear to be investigating or asking follow-up questions about this. What can be done to force ICANN to police the registrars for which it is responsible?"
... and it is, roughly speaking, illegal as hell in many jurisdictions.
At a minimum, get the word out so everyone knows about it. Also, vote with your dollars by taking your business elsewhere.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
I would ditch my 200+ domains at GoDaddy in a heartbeat.
The company is rife with unethical business practices.
I have experienced this same thing where GoDaddy bid against me in an auction.
They will also purposely not update your contact information / credit information for certain domains where they can grab them and sell them off at a profit. Which has also happened to me.
For whatever reason, there doesn't seem to be an equal price competitor to GoDaddy. That's a shame as there are many people who want to leave.
Wow, if Charles Dickens were writing today, he'd be all over that name.
Adam Dicker, quicker with the clicker than the clients he dicks o'er
Mr. Pinchloaf, known as a tight-ass most horribly, whose pucker snaps shut audibly
Nadia Rotchacokoff, who gives her love freely and her diseases venerally
Steve Ballmer, a rabid wombat would be much calmer, screaming, hurling chairs against the wallmer
President Bush and Vice President Dick, with names like that, someone's getting fucked right quick
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Its Certainly Unethical, sometimes illegal. Where I Live, If you do it in Real Estate Auctions, you can loose any profits, and get a few fines, Auctioneer can loose their license.
It is common practice at GoDaddy to bid on domains and resell them. So much so that the unwritten word was to open an account under a family members name in order to make it harder to trace back to yourself.
ICANN is a TERRIBLY badly managed organization, in my opinion.
I'm keeping a list of stories about GoDaddy on Slashdot, in order by date:
Go Daddy Usurps Network Solutions (2005-05-04)
GoDaddy Serves Blank Pages to Safari & Opera (2005-12-08)
GoDaddy.com Dumps Linux for Microsoft (2006-03-23)
GoDaddy Holds Domains Hostage (2006-06-17)
GoDaddy Caves To Irish Legal Threat (2006-09-16)
MySpace and GoDaddy Shut Down Security Site (2007-01-26)
That incident prompted this web site:
Exposing the Many Reasons Not to Trust GoDaddy with Your Domain Names. According to this March 11, 2008 story in Wired, GoDaddy shut down an entire web site of 250,000 pages because of one archived mailing list comment: GoDaddy Silences Police-Watchdog Site RateMyCop.com. See below for Slashdot's story about RateMyCop.com.
Alternative Registrars to GoDaddy? (2007-02-03)
GoDaddy Bobbles DST Changeover? (2007-03-11)
850K RegisterFly Domains Moved To GoDaddy (2007-05-29)
GoDaddy Silences RateMyCop.com (2008-03-12)
ICANN Moves Against GoDaddy Domain Lockdowns (2008-04-08)
GoDaddy VP Caught Bidding Against Customers (2008-06-29)
Any error or stories not included?
GoDaddy's reputation is not just one of a negative stories. In my opinion, GoDaddy tries to confuse non-technical people by offering services they don't need that are presented as valuable.
Here are some of the opinions of Bob Parsons, the owner of GoDaddy. He is pro-violence: Close Gitmo? No way!!
I would take a stand on principle, but there's no place to stand.
You're complaining about $2 a year per domain? Even for 200 domains that's only $400 more a year. If you really can't cover these costs, I have to wonder why you've got some many domains in the first place.
Your implication that people have endless dollars available to buy principle... a nice idea, but not part of reality for most of us.
You're really just thinking short term. How much is it going to cost you if godaddy suspends one of your domains because they want to? How much is it going to cost when you have to bid against godaddy? How much is it going to cost when they apply any of their other unethical practices?
If you can't afford $400 a year to not deal with scumbags, get out of whatever business you're in. Scambags always screw you over in the end.
AccountKiller
http://nodaddy.com/ has plenty of GoDaddy horror stories, along with recommendations and experiences for alternative companies. I say that we should all boycott GoDaddy.
Don't set a reserve, set the minimum bid. I never got he point of a reserve, its just a hidden minimum bid. Buyers should be able to see the minimum amount they would have to pay for something. Hiding it is just dishonest.
Where are you getting a price of $2 per year for a domain?
$2 a year is the DIFFERENCE between the $10 godaddy price, and other registrars which charge $12 a year (I know Joker.com is $12/year).
AccountKiller
It may be legal, but it is unethical.
And when you are a registrar, by far your most important asset is trust. GoDaddy no longer has mine, and I will no longer recommend them.
Well, in the simplest terms you are wrong, but the explanation is more complicated.
Knowing allowing shill bidding (whether by yourself or others) is cause for revocation of an auctioneer's license or fines by state regulators. The state law most often says that a business cannot conduct auctions without an auctioneer's license, so the leverage for fines and punishment is generally against continued ability to conduct auctions and not strictly a legal matter aside from maybe breach of contract claims or similar.
Shilling itself may or may not be illegal state by state, but just because you can't go to jail for it alone does not preclude you having your ass handed to you in a courtroom. Again, you can be sued under breach of contract or for violation of the UCC for which law may allow certain claims.
In this particular case, ICANN probably has some type of contract governing the auctions that GoDaddy is probably also violating. I would imagine that their hole is pretty deep in this matter.
Unethical, but not the slightest bit illegal.
You sure about that? From Wikipedia, on Shills in Auctions:
Shill bidding may be a common practice on eBay. In his book Fake: Forgery, Lies, & eBay, Kenneth Walton describes how he and his cohorts placed shill bids on hundreds of eBay auctions over the course of a year. While many sellers consider shill bidding a harmless act, some believe that it may violate federal or state laws. Walton and his associates were charged and convicted of fraud by the United States Attorney for their eBay shill bidding.
Yup. Sounds pretty illegal so far.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!