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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Wow…thanks for sharing Mike…this also tells us how busy big players like yourself are on a daily basis.
Bang.
You hit the nail on the head. Great analysis.
I was in 362 auctions (what a little peanut
and Halvarez beat me on zero. My rebate is just into four figures.
This helps to confirm the shill bidding motive.
Mike should get the opportunity to own those 34 domains.
I guess the positive out of this is the unexpected five figure check you’ll receive. Of course, he cost you a lot more than this but until this point, there wasn’t anything we could do about it. The 12,000 number is incredible as well. You are one of the few that might be best hiring your own personal lawyer
I’m on on 17,500 auctions, Nelson Brady won about 20. Rebate offer — low five figures.
Hard to believe only one username was involved here.
ALC
Once we get all the data scrapped and sorted we will get a pretty good feel if this was the case or not.
Correction: He won 30, I won 7,000
Great reporting, Mike.
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. Now I’m confused how I saw the name but did don’t see him in the bidding history.
On a side note, looking at the bidding history is really interesting. Many domains sure went for high prices.
Date,org – $150,000
SexFucking,com – $11,250
I’m interested in knowing if the number of 50,000 provided by Oversee is correct. Hopefully your analysis will help in that regard.
How many of the 5000 domains won by halvarez are at Dsposnor obscure registrars? (previosuly used dor tasting) when in doubt check their erie simmilar L A adresses.
Oversee = Overlooked
Robbie
How many of the domains any of us won were registered to one of those registrars?
Probably quite a few.
I’m sure they used all their tags to grab domains during the drops.
Not sure what the significance is of that
Sorry I meant actually now “owned” rather than “regitred” by these obscure DSponsor Subsidaries = Portfolio Brains .
JS
I may go down looking like an idiot, but I’m going to maintain my position on this until and if, new information comes out.
As it sits right now all disclosures on this whole mess and all details came from Oversee itself.
Its not like someone “found out” about it and reported on it.
Therefore, I’m going to take the numbers reported by Oversee as accurate.
I see no benefit for Oversee to release this story, all of the details and for it to be inaccurate.
At this point I still maintain had not Oversee released the info, it would have never seen the light of day
I hope for the industry sake I’m right.
What was your handle on Snap? (if you don’t mind me asking, I wish someone would create an index of snap aliases and who they really are) I was involved in about 1500 auctions (no idea how many included Halvarez), I won about 300, and Halvarez “participated” in about 150 of these…
Snap has not contacted me yet, with any kind of settlement offer.
I am more concerned about some of the domains I paid X,XXX + for…. was I bidding against a bot ???
How can I ever know? Wouldn’t a glossary like that be worthwhile – considering what are dealing with?
Their rebate’ offer is not in the email itself , there is a link you need to follow.(Service)
Oversee is also the victim here so I would think they have every intention of getting a handle on every last dollar.
They may be able to sue Brady and get some money back since it appears clear now that he was shill bidding to inflate the valuation of the company.
Also, Oversee may be able to write off every dollar and then X times annual revenue that they paid for Snapnames.
Obviously Oversee has been working on this for a while.
They must have contacted their lawyers at least many weeks ago to make sure they could fire Brady with cause, get Rust on board etc.
Rust turned around the rebate numbers in like 24 hours? No. They must have been working on this rebate for many weeks.
So, I’m confident Oversee will squeeze every ounce of truth out of this AND sue all parties involved.
Will snap survive? Hard to say, maybe Oversee will shut down Snapnames and take the entire $25million as a loss and tax write off.
I am absolutely convinced that this was a script, and that he was not manually placing hundreds of thousands of bids on tens of thousands of auctions. With his technical background, and the access he had to our max proxy, it wouldn’t make sense for him to do it manually. It also wouldn’t make sense, assuming that it was a script, for it to only be using one account. It is probably spread over many accounts so it wouldn’t be as suspicious. I feel like this is the tip of the iceberg, but that we’ll likely never get the whole story without a criminal investigation.
I can’t trust Snap any more…
Mike, I’m awed by the volume of auctions you participated in. I only bid on 75 auctions over the years, winning 49 – in 36 of which, “halvarez” was a participant; in 23 of them directly affecting the final price. Since then, many of these domains were sold. The damage caused by Nelson Brady goes beyond the inflated price paid for domains; he destroyed the credibility of an entire brand.
Great stuff. I’m looking forward to seeing your findings on how much (if any) nelson’s/halvarez’ bids impacted the final closing price across all the auctions you were involved in?
How many auctions Nelson won is not so important…it’s how many he was the 2nd highest bidder on.
Mike, since you have a large batch of auctions maybe you can get those stats together when you have a chance. That would be more interesting to see and would be more telling.
Thanks for sharing.
WQ
We are working on it
I sont know about oversee, but I am quite convinced SnapNames not only knew about this but orchestrated the all operation.
This is VP of engineering !!!
and like WQ sais: “How many auctions Nelson won is not so important…it’s how many he was the 2nd highest bidder on.”
Rob Sequin:
Oversee is Snapnames in fact …what are you talking about?
Since June 2007.
I guess their strategy to disassociate/distance from their huge problem is taking effect on some people…
From practical and legal purposes we should be referring to this as an “Oversee Fraud”
oversee.net/about
Headquartered in Los Angeles, the company’s core brands include DomainSponsor®, SnapNames®, Moniker®, and LowFares.comTM.
And then there is the Traffic/Moniker auctions, same plataform/man behind the scenes
Yaron
We are pulling this info as quickly as we can.
However I know is a much juicer story to say this was a huge conspiracy from top to bottom, but right now there is simply no evidence of anything other than Nelson doing this on his own for his own benefit and financial gain
Why would they have come forward with this if your comment was true?
Only if the info was about to be released from a third party, which once again there is no evidence of.
I’m not going to buy into this wholesale fraud claim without any evidence.
This theory fails simply because no one would code a bot like that with only one username!
Elliot’s theory is closer to the truth. http://www.elliotsblog.com/my-snapnames-theory-52942
Black Hat
Ever watch Jay Leno?
His favorite thing are stupid criminals.
Sometime those engaged in criminal enterprises do it in a fashion you can’t imagine.
However, I’m just not going to make assumptions.
This is why we are pulling all this information, will analyze it and report on it
Black Hat knows the truth..lol
Brian
I do not think it would be appropriate for me to disclose my snapnames handle publicly or anyone else’s for that matter. It may even violate their rules.
Having said that I can tell you I know for a fact that the following handles are real domainers that you would all know.
Vaxis
SaggyDimes
HipHop
BonkersTwo
Bonkers
BenFranklin
How are you going to compensate me for the loss of revenue, the pain and suffering and the loss of enjoyment of life. Loss of many nites of sleep.
My sex life was ruined from this scandal.
So how are you going to put a price on this?
What an incredible story! Cash money aside, what price tag would you put on the TIME spent (wasted) by customers participating in defrauded auctions. Collectively, many many people invested time into the domain name research, tracking, and biding process … often to no avail.
And at times passing on other acquisition options (potential domain buys) in lieu of a Snapnames domain they had their eye on.
Mike,
I agree. there is no evidence.
This is my gut feeling and nothing more.
However, I find it hard to believe SnapNames didnt know what was going on. reading DNF and NamePros it is clear they had more than a clue…
That said, I wont be surprise if Oversee didnt know what they were getting into when they bought Snapnames.
Max
This will go to the issue of damages which I agree is well beyond the simple formula they are offering.
We will get to this when the time is right.
Yaron
If people complained to Snap about strange bidding problem, whom at Snap would they have turned to investigate?
Probably their lead tech guy, the one who built the system and understood it better than anyone else
Nelson
Robbie,
You said “Oversee is SnapNames since 2007″
very incorrect. Oversee – while they may own SnapNames is still a separate entity outside of SnapNames. Almost like saying Pepsi Cola is the same as a distributing plant they own. Large corporations often buy smaller companies but that rarely ever means they are one in the same. Many times the parent company is held liable for the auctions but as Rob Sequin said “Oversee was also the victim here”
I think a lot of people are letting conspiracy theories go above and beyond what actually happened and to bring Oversee in this well – you might as well say Low.com, Degrees.com, DomainSponsor.com or hell – any parked domain owned by Oversee were all part of the whole conspiracy theory.
Let’s not confuse the parties here. This issue was directly related to Snapnames – MOST which occurred before Oversee was nothing more than a bidder like you, I or Mike on snapnames.
Oversee’s responsibility at this point is to protect thier investment (snapnames) but we all know Snap will continue to thrive. As Frank Schilling said when NameJet was announced a while back — whoever gets the gold will win (something close to that). Same thing with domains – if sex.com is dropping tomorrow and you can only bid for it on snap everyone, even the people pissed off right now will bid.
Although this issue has been quite a bombshell for people personally and professionaly life will go on at Snapnames just as we know it. Worst case is they will have a few suits pending but even the outcome of these suits (if any) will be smimply debt incurred.
Instead of conspiracy theories what I would like to ask one question (instead of continually reading about manhunts against almost every possible company or person here)
How would you handle this if this was your company and the actions affected your brand?
I’m pretty sure many of you would be doing exactly what Oversee is doing – and some a lot less.
There is no WIN WIN situation for any outcome like this – All you can ask is for the liable company to step up and try to resolve the problem to the best of its ability accommodating the large majority of those affected. No company in ANY situation such as this will ever make everyone happy but imo they are doing a fair job.
“This theory fails simply because no one would code a bot like that with only one username!”
I agree with Black Hat Domainer…..especially when the name “Halvarez” has already been suspected or accused of being a potential shill bidder over the last few years on the forums.
So far the current “theory” is far too simple and too obvious, I would expect a random, alternating and ever changing pattern from a talented programmer who was trying to cover his tracks.
One fake name operating in 50,000 auctions under one account for 4+ years does’nt sound very inventive to me.
..There’s got to be more to this but not necessarily involving the participation of other Snapnames or Oversee employees.
Mike–might also be helpful to know (though a very small sample for statistical purposes); of the 34 auction that Nelson won, on how many were you the 2nd highest bidder?
Thanks for the info and analysis.
I have the feeling that Brady operated with only one account. It’s would be, in my opinion, easier to conceal/make look real one fake account than 3 or 4.
Maybe all this is just a hoax!!!
Just to get more attention to the domain industry….LMAO
I think Alan has made some excellent points.
I once again think Oversee has all they could do in this situation.
If you wonder why you rarely see anyone admit guilt and try to clean up a mess, this is why.
Instead of receiving any credit for being forthcoming and making any attempt at a fix, they are getting viciously attacked.
After seeing the response Oversee received you think any other company in the space is going to go public if they find improprieties?
Would you?
from the horses mouth.
http://oversee.net/news_details.php?id=324
LOS ANGELES (JUNE 15, 2007)–Oversee.net, a leading technology-driven online marketing solutions company, announced today that it has completed the acquisition of SnapNames, the operator of the largest available source of expired and deleting domain names
wake up and smell the coffee.
Everyone of the executives enjoyed the big FAT bonues earned by the artificially and ilegally obtained INFLATED profitis ( at Snap and Oversee)
RICO anyone?
Robbie
not sure what this means in the scheme of things.
Oversee certainly over paid for Snapnames.com based on the revenue it generated including all that shill bidding.
beyond that its still on Nelson
You are to nice…
The lawyers know that ultimately Oversee , their Eexcutives, their Complaiance Dept are responsible for Nelson misdeeds …
Are you going to try to collect from Hanky?
Have you checked who owns those 34 domain Halvarez/Nelson/Snapnames beat you out of it…?
I read somewhere else (and it makes sense) somebody else from Billing had to be colluded…
Robbie
Nice doesn’t enter into it
Oversee is not saying that aren’t responsible they have already set up a fund to compensate. Whether that amount is sufficient is a different question for a different day
However are exec of Oversee somehow criminally liable?
If you own an McDonald’s and your manager steals money, as the owner how are you criminally responsible for his actions?
As far as to who owns the domains, this seems to be the likely whois:
Registrant Contact:
DomainQueue
Domain Admin ()
Fax:
2661 N Pearl St
#255
Tacoma, WA 98407
US
Administrative Contact:
DomainQueue
Domain Admin (domainqueue@gmail.com)
+1.2532752381
Fax:
2661 N Pearl St
#255
Tacoma, WA 98407
US
Technical Contact:
DomainQueue
Domain Admin (domainqueue@gmail.com)
+1.2532752381
Fax:
2661 N Pearl St
#255
Tacoma, WA 98407
US
Status: Locked
Name Servers:
dq1.kolmic.com
dq2.kolmic.com
Another thing that happened with many auctions. Halvarez bid at $60. You saw the domain had one bid. You bid. You won. Now you overpaid because you might have waited for it to really drop and grab it for $8.00 instead $60. No way to know how many times that really happened. Easy to work that script into the system. If the bot/script won it was not paid and it dropped for real but people might have been forced to bid $60 to win it.
Dave
That is true.
Its just one of the many scenarios that come into play and are not accounted for in the settlement
well… will be interesting to see what action / inaction Nelson takes here.. I know he was selling a LOT of domain names and taking the money for them… where would he have placed this money?? not anywhere where they can be got at methinks.. so.. am guessing he has also moved away any serious $ and declared himself bankrupt…then when all the dust settles, will just move away to some nice quiet spot in the world and put his feet up..
I agree that at first would have just been pumping the co. assets,but obv got carried away and couldn’t stop himself, always the way with thiefs when they find the ‘perfect’ scam.. they abuse it too much… on one forum I am on, one of the members even suggested hank alvarez was inside snapnames….they are all kicking themselves now….. i wonder if the complaints got so bad some just went behind Nelson’s back to sort out the issue (as he obv wasn’t doing anything about it) and then uncovered the can of worms… would be interesting to find out this information!!..
On another point, will be intersting to see how this impacts on the Jan show for DS… maybe more attendees just to see them squirm on stage as they will undoubtedly raise the issue
I am Nelson Alvarez!!!
I just want to make a public statement about my name which has been confused with “Nelson” and “Halvarez”. I have received various emails asking what was my part in this situation. While I own hundreds of domains, I have never heard of this person and the domains that I own are not the ones in questions.
SO overall its also fair to say a lot of domain valuations have been artifically inflated over the last five years. Ron Jackson will certainly have to adjust his Yearly sales numbers on the whole when he talks about annual sales numbers.
We now have $60 names that people say would have waited and got for $8. We have $60 names bid up into the hundreds and thousands that now the winners want to say I should get it for $60. NOW I am not saying what Snapnames did was right and people should get compensation for everything they bid on, it just shows that the overall industry numbers are over inflated.
Also shows the frenzy that happens in an auction, reading all the posts on forums and blogs it seems a lot of names that were $60 quality got bid up just because the auction frenzy. There is something to be learned from that too IMO.
Ary
The is definitely an auction psychology which sometime leads to bidding madness.
Subject of a future post