All three 3 letter.com discussed in the post did in fact drop today and all 3 were picked up by snapnames.

The auctions close on Wed at 3:15pm EST

Here are the current high prices:

icz.com $4,500.00

mcu.com $3,606.00

wdy.com $2,766.00

They have been doing this for years, and we have been writing about it for the 2 years we have been blogging.

Its because ICANN has refused to issue any uniform rules or regulations to mandate how expired domains should be handled and now believe that the money registrars make off of expired domains are part of the “secret sauce” that keeps them very profitable.

Now, when a registrar auction offs a domain, their return on investment is off the charts. The only cost is the $ 7. renewal fee.
Multiple that gross profit by 100′s a day, 365 days a year.

Pool, Snapnames, Moniker, Network Solutions, Enom, Tucows, Godaddy, Dotster, etc are making millions from auctioning off something they really don’t own 35-40 days before the auction.

I don’t believe these met that requirement.

Since, the 3 domains are with Netsol, why didn’t they go thru Namejet where they would profit from the deletion?
There is more to this story that we don’t know.

Also sometime the registrar itself just “renews” the domain internally but I agree once it hits pending delete you can no longer renew the domain or redeem the domain, these should drop

A registrar can delete a domain even if it has a renewal date in the future.

Some of the possible reasons -
Fraudulent renewal payment.
Domain owner request.
Incorrect whois.
Clerical error by registrar.
UDRP order.
and more.

I don’t know about the 3 domains.