I’ve seen a number of comments on my blog and other places criticizing Snapnames for not providing the auction history for bidders prior to 2007. According to the company, in June of 2005, Snapnames limited a person’s order history to 24 months prior to the date the look-up was being performed.
As a result of this order history truncation, many people have complained that they couldn’t gain access to their order histories to compare them to the rebate emails sent to many Snap customers on Friday.
As of this evening, I have been informed that the staff at Snapnames has adjusted the system so order and bid histories are available back to August 2004, when auctioning began with the company. I have checked my auction history (dating back to 2006), and it appears that everything is there, although I have participated in less than 125 total auctions.
You will now be able to review all auctions in which you participated to cross-check the rebate offer with your results. You can also get an idea of the number of auctions of yours in which “halvarez” participated – both auctions that you won and lost (possibly even to “halvarez.”) I appreciate the transparency, and when I fully inspect the history sometime soon, I hope I don’t find any domain auctions in which I lost to “halvarez” where I really wanted the name.
I also want to take a second to say that there are a number of good people who work for Snapnames and Oversee.net who probably had absolutely nothing to do with any of this mess. Keep this in mind if you need to speak with anyone at the company. I worked in AIG’s Accident Insurance direct marketing group before the meltdown, and I know that many of my former colleagues were treated poorly simply because they worked for the company, despite the fact that they had absolutely nothing to do with the company’s problems. While you might have every right to be pissed at the company and certain individuals at the company, there are plenty of good people who work there too, and this is tough on them as well.
FYI, I’m surprised that out of 362 auctions I was in going back to 2004, Halvarez didn’t win ANY but he did cost me over $1000 in inflated pricing according to Rust.
So, to me this seems to be a clear case of shill bidding to inflate prices which means higher revenue figures therefore inflating the valuation of Snapnames prior to the Oversee purchase. Also, perhaps he got bonuses based on revenue targets.
Assuming he had stock, raising the valuation of the company would put more money in his pocket than whatever domain sales revenue he got from selling to iReit.
I would think Oversee would want some money out of Brady and maybe others.
What snapnames should be making public is the history of all auctions where halvarez bid