Scandalous Sedo Sales, BOOBTUBE.com Mishap
Sedo, one of the largest aftermarket domain sales portals has had their trustworthiness and security measures come under fire as of late. As reported by Jay Westerdall of DomainTools, many domains can be found listed on auction at Sedo that are no longer for sale or changed hands years prior. Jay also points out that even some of the bidding looks suspicious and fraudulent, vcharacter.com has a bidder at $100,000 right now, quite odd for the estimated value of such a name.
Mark Coker and his wife are the authors of “BOOB TUBE”, a novel about the daytime television soap opera industry, to be published later this year. After bidding up an auction for the domain BoobTube.com, which eventually reached a high bid of $41,688, SEDO contacted Coker with some bad news. The listed seller of the domain didn’t own BoobTube.com at all and to his surprise and dismay the auction was promptly canceled after 2 weeks of bidding.
You can read Mark Coker’s article on his full experience in being involved with this fake auction. He agrees that Sedo may have acted appropriately in canceling the auction and not allowing for any funds to change hands, however he states that their are inherent flaws with their system that need to be addressed.
