I recently had the opportunity to interview Jeff Kupietzky, CEO of Oversee.net and wanted to share a portion of that interview. Below are five questions that to this point have not been answered about the SnapNames auction fraud. Tomorrow I will post the full interview with ten additional questions.
Q. When did Oversee learn about bidding by an employee?
A. October 2009
Q. How did Oversee learn that an employee had been bidding?
A. As part of our ongoing efforts to improve internal controls, our finance group noticed un-authorized refunds which led to an internal inquiry and then an external inquiry that surfaced the issues.
Q. Did anyone ever investigate bidder “halvarez” after so many complaints over the years?
A. Yes. Unfortunately, the person responsible for investigating was the employee who was perpetrating the fraud and skillfully concealed his conduct.
Q. Did Oversee executives ever try to speak to or meet with “halvarez” who accounted for a % of SnapNames revenue?
A. Yes, but as mentioned above, management unfortunately relied on the representations of the employee. In hindsight, that obviously was a mistake. As you know, in our industry there are many individuals who place great value on their privacy. As such, it was not unusual to have a large bidder who didn’t want to meet.
Q. What measures are in place to ensure insider bidding doesn’t happen again?
A. Apart from continuing to rely on the advice of experts who we are consulting on best practices here, which remains on ongoing process, the company has implemented closer monitoring of bidding activity for suspect behavior; more specific and restrictive domain name ownership policies for employees; and enhanced controls over financial transactions.
Another casual video this week. I was going to have Tia help me, but she couldn’t make it at the last minute. So, as incentive to watch this week’s video I’m giving away 10 Bido.com accelerator credits. Watch the video for entry details.
Links:
New Site To Sell Your Domains Launches – BestDomainsWebsite.com by TheDomains.com
DomainState.com Up For Sale And Going To Auction by ChefPatrick.com
Submit Your Domain Names For Domainer Mardi Gras Auction by ChefPatrick.com
NameBio.com Sold by DotWeekly.com
Michael Berkens Accepts SnapNames Settlement by TheDomains.com
ExpressBacklinks.com Link Package Giveaway by ChefPatrick.com
Bruce Marler Live Interview On DomainSuccess.com January 13th by BruceMarler.com
Guest Post By The Purchaser Of CookingGames.com $350,000 by DirectNavigation.com
Update – Bido accelerator credits have been awarded to Cole.
Earlier today DomainState.com’s owners placed their 7 year old domaining forum up for sale. Their reason given for selling; “It is with a sad heart that we have realized that it is no longer something we can commit the same level of energy as we once did.”
Stats:
Google Page Rank: 4
Google Search: Ranks third for “domain forum” “domaining forum” domainer forum”
Alexa: 67,726
Compete: 2846 Unique and 15042 Total Visits
If my math is correct then this forum has over 14,000 active and inactive members to go along with over 450,000 posts. The three owners do account for about 10% of those posts.
Sales price? Open to offers but would like to sell within the next couple of weeks. If you are interested in making an offer for the forum then submit to admin@domainstate.com.
You can read more, direct from the owners by visiting DomainState.com.
What do you think the forum will sell for?
My guess, if compete.com stats are anywhere near correct then $7,000-$12,000. I believe their member database is worth this price alone. Anyone looking to broker domain names could certainly benefit from a database like this. Now, if the site was already monetized and income stats could be provided then it would probably sell for a lot more. Whoever purchases this site should be able to easily make $1,000 per month starting off. Again, these numbers are purely speculative because compete.com is not the most accurate tool for traffic estimates.
***UPDATE – I just made an offer to purchase DomainState.com***
My first blog post of 2010 is a video. Using the webcam again for the weekly video, I actually like this format. Uploading directly to YouTube makes it quick, easy and no editing.
Domainers.us, which launched in July of 2009, was created to highlight one influential domainer every month. Each month domain investors nominate fellow domainers for this award. Then, the five nominees are voted on by the public to find a single winner.
With a total of 84 votes, I received 38% (32 votes) of them making me the influential domainer of the month for November.
Thank you to everyone whom voted for me, I really appreciate it.
