12,000 Auctions: The Halvarez Effect On Our Account (So Far)
Now that Snapnames put all auction history into the system going back to its first auction in August 2004 (prior to that Snapnames gave the domain to the person who backordered it first) I can make a preliminary report.
We were involved in 11,997 auctions from August 2004 until today.
We know snapnames.com by its own admission had around 1 million auctions, so while my history only represents 1.2% of all their auctions, outside of Buydomains, Frank and the Ham’s, mine is probably one of the biggest samples available.
So the burning question is out of 12,000 auctions, how many did Halvarez win?
34
What was my settlement offer?
Lets say mid-five figures.
How many of the almost 12K domain auctions did I win?
About 5,000
Initial conclusions.
Brady activities seem to be largely concentrated to shill bidding for purposes of increasing Snapnames.com revenue, increasing the company’s value in which he was a shareholder and giving him a big payday when Oversee purchased them (remember Oversee said 75% of his activity was before the purchase).
These numbers indicate to me that my initial posts (here, here and here) on this matter were correct.
You have in Brady a guy who not only an employee, shareholder and officer of Snapnames.com but the guy who designed the back end software system and backbone that the whole auction system runs on.
He was the gatekeeper, the guru, the professor.
He was the one guy with the knowledge and access to the inside working of the system that could manipulate it.
He bid on a ton of names, won a few, lost most.
In the process bidding he pushed prices up and up increasing his bottom line, increased his shares value prior to Oversee’s acquisition and would guess his compensation with Oversee after the acquisition. There would seem to be little doubt the Brady compensation with Oversee was based on part (small or large) to the performance of Snapnames, and the higher the gross, the higher his compensation.
I know everyone is looking for a juicier story. One in which more employees of Oversee are implicated, but for now, with the facts we have I’m going to stick to my original position that this is what is was represented to be, and the only questions now is damages.
Damages will be the subject of future posts.
Right now we are now in the process of scrapping all the data from each auction and putting it into a database so we can see how Halvarez affected all our auctions.
Once we have this info and have had time to analyze it, we will share our conclusions.
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Seems clear the system itself was seemingly tainted, with the ability to manipulate baked right into it, and the juice went to Snapnames, right? They are toast, so take time to decide how to play this. A question of available assets and strategy as opposed to liability and a very good time to impose any necessary systemic changes going forward..
Domain values inflated? At the end of the day the buyer was willing to pay the ending bid price then regardless of how it got there I don’t think any of this is an argument for inflated domain values across the board to be quite honest.
Yes, many domains would have been purchased for less if Nelson wasnt around but again – 1% of the auctions from ONE vendor.
This does not count for sales week week after week on SEDO, Afternic, Traffic Auctions, Private Sellers, Namejet, GoDaddy, Fabulous and more.
If 1% of auctions from ONE vendor were affected it really doesn’t translate to inflated values for the entire industry – actually not even close.
In fact, if the buyer was willing to pay the higher price (regardless of Nelson) it was still a fair indicator of value – at that time – since an argument could be made the buyer would have paid that price regardless if the second bidder was Halvarez or someone else with the same bidding for the particular name.
Most people feel they got burned .. and they did because of the trust violation and the lost opportunities from the names involved and loss of use for the extra cash required to win these names which may have very well helped you buy other domains at the time and have a stronger business today…
BUT here’s the rub
The same people who won and paid for the auctions Halverez affected still ended up paying a price they were happy with and were glad to win.
Considering you need a nothing more than an I.Q of 25 or more – everyone was and should be still very aware about the possibility of fraud using online auctions .. anywhere…. snap, ebay – any online auction. Its not just domains.
Its a risk we live in today, tommorrow and 10 years from now.
You can take almost anything what you want of the fraud and translate it to be a cause factor for many many things. We also can all find ways to hate people or blame companies in this industry but 2 years from now we will still be bidding on Snap.
This is turning less noteworthy day after and day for the masses (those affected can work it out with Oversee/SnapNames as the process is set up or retain thier own counsel) but honestly, lets not kill an industry we all are actually trying to build?
For what I gather here and at other forums most large to medium domainers will settle (not crticizing that at all ) rest assured when the lawsuit(s) comes the first name as a Defendant will be Oversee (as it should be) adn thankfully there pockets are full (vs Enron Worldcom Maddof cases) the ones that take eahc case to court will do better (vs Class Action)
You CAN NOT be a large Corporation “Fat cat” and just seat in your arse collecting profits ,there is duties, responsabilties, due diligence, vigilance…this is not a game.
We compalinted as far back as 2007…we were constantly ignored = poor customer service.
The evidence and negligence are overwhelming.(understament of the year)
Poor Oversee…my arse .
(They own this Pig Pan for over 2 years, they milked good)
Time for Oversee to face the music.
(if any of you still think Oversee is not the Primmary Defendant in this case consult with your lawyers)
If the Feds go inside. ..when they do expect plenty of surprises…
Moniker needs to come out in public and give people some reassurance os fome type ,
I understand large amounts of domains exiting…
I exit this thread now , thanks to Mike for his brave posture.
Good Luck..Good Nite.
MHB,
I think your example of a McDonald’s manager above is flawed.
If the manager were stealing from McDonald’s, the owner may or may not be criminally liable. I think that would depend on whether McDonald’s decided to press charges.
In this case the manager was not stealing from “McDonald’s” so to speak, but from McDonald’s customers, which seems to me would very much make McDonald’s liable.
Disclaimer: Not a lawyer, and don’t play one on TV, either.
Pat
If the employee of Mcdonalds was stealing from customers of McDonalds they would be liable BUY civilly, not criminally.
Oversee is not running away from this and telling people one our employees engaged in unlawful activities and go chase him, they are willing to pay for the employees action but I’m saying they cannot be held criminally liable for this employees action unless the knew and covered it up, which has yet to be proved, or were guilty of criminal misconduct or negligence which has a much higher standard of proof then a civil case.
Alan
I disagree with you.
You cannot remove part of the bid of an auction and say for sure it would wind up with the same result.
Bidder A let’s say me bids $1K
Bidder b let’s say you bids $2K
The fraudster bids $6K.
You bid $7K
I bid $8K.
Now your saying hey, mike was happy paying $8k but we have no way of knowing if the fraudster never bid what would have happened. Maybe no one would have be $6K.
Psychology of the auction is a huge topic.
I have plenty of more on this but I’m waiting for another post, on another day
what usernames on ebay are shill bidders? I bet you 10% of all bids on ebay are SHILL.
Jack
Maybe but they aren’t employees and officers of ebay doing it
You would need to distinguish pendingdelete auctions and other auctions – Halvarez was doing only pendingdelete. 100% only. Since 2005 I was in 23,000 auctions, won 14,000 (don’t know how many of it pendingdelete), Halvarez won 430 (Total $310K) , three with highest bids were $28K, $11.5K and $10.5K
“I was in 280 auctions and can’t find Halvarez in any of them. Funny though, I sure do remember seeing the name very clearly many times.”
Because Nelson was deleting regulary Halvarez from Uaciton history when he won. I caught him several times in the act, he told me is some internal error, I told him it is strange it always affects only Halvareze’s auctions, he told me I am beeing (again) paranoid
“Rust turned around the rebate numbers in like 24 hours? No. They must have been working on this rebate for many weeks. ”
Not true, if you have full bidding data, you just feed database, make some simple application and voila – few hours later you got results
Like I said, I have many auctions with Halvarez (some just a heads-up), and still no offer. I am being offended that I haven’t gotten a BS release and offer, yet
Mike,
I agree 100% with you – the damage of the “unknown” affect is probably larger than the damage itself and a simple look at auction records can never truly measure that.
I cant find the comment but this was a reply to someone indicating that somehow all domain values should be affected by this. I think – although the gravity of this affected many – the persons comment about applying this fraud to correct all domain values was over-reaching.
Its been said many times over that Nelson’s actions only accounted for fraud in 1% of auctions – even double that for all the unknowns and I still cant see how an industry wide correction is warranted especially since many many of these auctions have been flipped again since 2005-2007.
I’m on the same page with you.
“Because Nelson was deleting regulary Halvarez from Uaciton history when he won. I caught him several times in the act, he told me is some internal error, I told him it is strange it always affects only Halvareze’s auctions, he told me I am beeing (again) paranoid”
So the data we all analyze is possibly incorrect. Makes things interesting to all. Care to share the email communication with Nelson here?
is “?” really a valid bidder handle? That one is showing up a lot in my auction history… .”halvarez”… not so much. WTF?
Remember the big Snap outages in the summer of 2008.
I remembered exchanging emails with Nelson on a couple topics. Here’s one that’s kind of odd to read in light of what he was doing at the time:
Nelson Brady
to Nelson Brady
date Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 3:55 PM
subject SnapNames auction that were still running when the site went down are extending
Dear Customer,
We are very sorry for any inconvenience; unfortunately we had a system error on a domain auction that you had an active bid placed on. This occurred at the auction close time, not allowing the auctioning domain to close properly.
To ensure fairness for all parties involved, we are extending these auctioning domains to close at 12:15 Pacific time on Friday the 15th.
You can view and bid on these names from your SnapNames’ account.
Many thanks for your business,
Nelson Brady
(his signature has his cell phone which I don’t think I should post here)
END
Now we have to wonder, did Brady take down Snap for his own personal gain? According to his emails is was an issue with a vendor but since his whole job was a lie, can I believe anything he said?
So, I hope Oversee is looking into the BIG snap outages from summer 2008.
Cartoonz
I have an auction with the winning bidder as “+”
“Care to share the email communication with Nelson here?”
OK here you are – one of MANY email exchanges I have had with Nelson on Halvarez topic:
======================
Nelson pls
Again do not see in my history
runnings.com
This happens ONLY if the winner is Halvarez
This is statistically practically impossible to happen,
you can not wonder there is such a mystery around
him, because what are the odds this happens by chance ?
======================
You are correct it is impossible. Also it is not true. There are
currently 16 such cases from a report I get. 2 for halvarez. The rest
for others. The common thread is payment type account credit and a
glitch in payment processing. It usually clears up about 8:30 when we
do our last payment run. I can not access the db currently but if still
a problem in the morning I will have it checked out.
=======================
So either he was lying OR he had many handles for bidding who get special payment treatment
Thank you.
I have one domain when he outbid me and won the auction. Now will I get the domain back or what?
Vikas
Not through the settlement, a solution for that is not being offered
Should I join the class-action suit to get back? This really sucks on part of Oversee for offering a solution for those who lost the domains to their employee.
Vikas
You should seek legal counsel to determine what your rights are.
I’m not sure any of the class actions will be seeking return of any of the domains Brady won and paid for.
If the names are NOW owned by Oversee or any of their obscure subsidiaries (dozens of previous domain tasters) …ask for them.
These names are goign to make them look pretty bad in any court proceeding IMHO.
.
MHB – Can you compute the following for “Halvarez” in your auctions:
Sum of Completed Bid / Count of Initial Bid
That is – the dollar amount paid by “Halvarez” in the 34 wins divided by the number of auctions “Halvarez” participated in.
Someone
We are getting very close in having our info in a meaningful and organized form and will be publishing some results hopefully tomorrow.
On another note you wouldn’t happen to use this same ID on Snapnames would you? Someone?
Let us define “Auction Value to Bidder” (AVB) as the sum of dollars paid by a user for auctions won divided by the number of auctions entered for any given sample of n auctions.
AVB = Sum(Completed Bid) / Count(Initial Bid).
If you can calculate AVB for all users in your sample with n > Halvarez’s that may float a few interesting things… And no, I’m not the one with the same ID, but in the sample I’m working on has “someone” with very low AVB.
Do you know who “someone” and “100001″ are?
100001 seems to have won
warsurplus.com and FAMILYSECRET.COM among others
Someone’s names seem to be registered at Fab with privacy
Think both are real bidders
“Halvarez” has also won actions. When bidding, there is always a risk of winning… Do you really believe there was only one SnapNames ID used?