An update on some sales that actually didn’t happen

An update on some sales that actually didn’t take place and Michael from Namebio has been contacted so he will remove them from Namebio.

I wrote about Roy Flanders’ names expiring after GreatNames.com sold for $25,000 and echecking.com sold for $1,325 on GoDaddy auctions. I confirmed that Roy’s daughter was able to recover the names and the names are back to pointing to where they were before expiry, parked at Uniregistry.

A week later I wrote about CrowdedHouse.com expired and closed at $12,000. I reached out to Neil Finn, the founder of the band, an Australian domainer Matt Jackson also reached out after reading the article. I then got an email from a musician in Australia who said he came across the story and knew someone who knew Neil and was going to have them reach out. I don’t know what Neil actually read or if he just recovered the name on his own, but the name was recovered and back to pointing to the Crowded House page on Universal Music Australia.

Lastly on TLDinvestors I wrote about the epic bidding war for ShopeeMall.com, just two bidders, and the name went to $61,000. The name has been renewed, it was at PublicDomainRegistry. The website is back up and running the same way it was before expiry.

The one common theme here is the auctions all closed and I know many will ask, “Didn’t GoDaddy close this loophole?” Well back on December 4, 2017 GoDaddy changed their domain renewal timeline from 42 to 30 days for most domains. They stated, “Based on our research, less than 1% of our customers renew after 30 days.”

The problem here is GoDaddy can only do this for their own domain names. GreatNames.com and eChecking.com were at enom. CrowdedHouse.com was at 123-Reg.co.uk and ShopeeMall.com was at PublicDomainRegistry.