Last night, I was looking through a few of the NamesCon extended auction domain names on NameJet and I saw a bidder alias I didn’t recognize. “njhighbid” is in the lead on several high profile auctions. For example, the njhighbid bidder alias has the high bid of $550,000 on the Super.com auction.
When I see a bidder nickname I don’t recognize, it makes me a bit suspicious. This is especially so when I see the same bidder leading several auctions. In this particular case, none of the auctions I saw njhighbid as the high bidder had met the reserve price.
With the “nj” in the bidder handle, I thought this might be a house account related to the auctioneer, so I reached out to NameJet General Manager Jonathan Tenenbaum to ask about the bidder alias. Jonathan confirmed that this bidder handle “represents the high bid in room from the live auction.” I believe this was necessary because the live auction used different software from the NameJet platform, and live auction bidders were not necessarily connected to NameJet bidder accounts.
Even though it might look suspicious that there is a bidder handle in the lead on multiple high value auctions, it is not something concerning.
I agree.
Very suspicious.
That’s why I hate auction.
The point is that this is not suspicious.
It is not really right. Is that bidder still interested at the price
listed? If so, then it seems ok.
If not, they could open the lots at the reserves.
I have domains in the after sale. If I drop the reserve to the bid that is listed will it sell? Is that allowed?
My opinion is that overall the auction did not go well. Sure lower priced
domains sell. A few higher priced domains did but certainly not many.
Many if not most domains are not too good, not the top for their category and overpriced.
IMO, the issue would be that they may not know who the bidder was during the live auction.
For instance, a random NamesCon attendee may have placed a $500,000 bid during the live auction on a name that had a $1m+ reserve. I doubt that the auctioneers record bidder paddles for underbids, so it would not be easy (or possible) to hold the bidder to their bid.