Seems a forensic investigation is in order to really “scrub” the SnapNames systems and uncover the real culprit. If this was in fact fraud, and if the data suggest that SnapNames looked the other way while this was going on, it surely leaves them complicit and seemingly “OK with the bidder’s actions”.

Throwing one person under the bus (Nelson) does little to alleviate the fact that there is much evidence now that does in fact suggest that this was “a conspiracy to commit fraud”.

Being a domainner since 1995, and seeing the industry changes throughout that time, it was evident (consistently lower CPC over time, higher, more competitive bidders in drop, and aftermarket auctions, and the hoarding of domains by registrars) it was the right time a few years ago to sell out…

Warning: If you think this industry will clean it self up because of the SnapNames debacle, think again…this is just the tip of the iceberg, and I expect various “nefarious” anecdotes to surface over the next few months, of registrars, parking companies, or the BIG guys manipulating, and perhaps cheating the smaller guys out of the lions share of the market. I am not making any accusations, but this is probably the largest “black-box” industry going, and to get to the bottom of anything will need the blessing of ICANN, and the justice system – of which neither seem to have given much attention to it so far, as far as I have read…

Good luck domainners!

“Halvarez” was definitely a script – this was clear to anyone who was watching him closely over the last few years – it simply wasn’t physically possible for a human to bid on that many closing auctions at one time. As the auction time was extended, halvarez would make multiple bids, sometimes on hundreds of domains at once. He was definitely using a script – are you suggesting someone else wrote it for him?

What bothers me about this whole thing is, if he just wanted expired domains, he had the know-how to create his own registrars and his own personal backordering system, just for himself, without any risk, but he didn’t. He could have done so behind the scenes, with none of the risks he took (faking account refunds!), while still working for SnapNames and he could have even sabotaged SnapNames ability to catch the names he wanted so he had a better chance of grabbing them for himself, but he didn’t.

Why take the risk when he didn’t have to? My guess is that SnapNames knew he was doing it. I bet some lowly, pissed off ex-employee has threatened to blow the whistle and SnapNames have been forced to beat them to the punch.

However, I don’t agree that this means there wasn’t a conspiracy. It would have been VERY dangerous for him to write a script like that (or even do it manually) without having access to our max proxy bids. If his script was connecting to the database to get our max bids, then Snap definitely should have known about it. It would have either been sitting on their server, or establishing a connection from another server which SHOULD set off some red flags.

I would bet this was a script, but that there were other high-ups that knew about it and condoned it. I also think there were other usernames involved, it wouldn’t make sense for him to write the script and only have one bot doing the bidding, that would arouse suspicions quicker.

I don’t think we’re getting the whole story here, not by a long shot.

Either you were in on it or were too stupid..both are unacceptable possibilities and you should get the boot

It just seems to be an awful lot of auctions to be hands on every day and still perform daily tasks.

Again, this is all just my theory.