Xavier Media®

Snapnames recently discovered that an employee had setup an account for himself under false name to bid in auctions at Snapnames (something which is not allowed by Snapnames). This behavior is not allowed by Snapnames and luckily it only affected a small part of their auctions (approximately five percent of total SnapNames auctions since 2005 according to the email sent out by Snapnames).

This is from the email we got earlier today:

Though on some occasions the employee won the auction, in many instances the bidding caused the ultimate auction winner to pay more for a name than had the employee not participated in the auction.

SnapNames neither condones this conduct nor wants to be perceived as benefiting from the conduct. Accordingly, we have decided that regardless of the circumstance, in every auction where the employee’s fictitious account submitted a bid which resulted in a higher price being paid by the winning bidder, SnapNames will offer a rebate, with 5.22% interest (the highest applicable federal rate during the affected time period), to affected customers for the difference between the prices they actually paid and the prices they would have paid, had the employee not bid in the auctions. The rebate will be available in cash or in credit on the SnapNames platform, at your discretion.

The fact that Snapnames takes action against this, sends out an email informing their customers and also compensate the customers with interest shows that you can trust Snapnames. In the domain name auction business trust is an extremelly important factor and I think this really shows that you can continue to use Snapnames for your auctions.

Another good thing that indicate trust is that Snapnames will not handle the discounts themselves, instead they will let Rust Consulting, an independent third party, administer the rebate offer.

If you have used Snapnames some time after 2005 you may have a rebate available in your account.

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.