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Major Domain Sales Platform Refuses to Remove Fraudulent IDNs
Safe buying and selling is a major concern for domainers. Nearly everyone in the domain industry has at least one story of a transfer gone wrong, payment that was late or never received, or scammers extorting money for bogus appraisals or domain listing services.
Sedo.com is one sales venue that has tried to remedy this through their transfer process. According to their website, "Sedo is very proud of our perfect security record: In well over a thousand domain transactions, we have never had a seller lose their domain or not receive their payment. We believe that this outstanding security record is because Sedo's assistance in the transfer process goes far beyond what most other services offer."
However, as secure as their transfer process may be, Sedo is failing miserably in another area of domain security: fraudulent domains.
Recently, Sedo has allowed the listing of several fraudulent IDNs on their live auction platform. These IDNs have no meaning in any other language, and are being registered and sold with the sole purpose of deceiving buyers, who could in turn use them to deceive less-diligent web users through phishing scams.
In addition, speculation and conventional wisdom suggests that the domains are being added to the auctions and having their prices inflated through "shill-bidding," a process in which someone known to the seller posts bids against legitimate bidders in an effort to drive the price higher.
Domains such as shóp.com (xn--shp-hna.com), traffìc.com (xn--traffc-0va.com) and láw.com (xn--lw-mia.com), all worthless, meaningless domains, are currently on sale through Sedo.com auctions.
In addition, some of these scam domains have sold recently - domaín.com (xn--doman-2sa.com) sold for $1,500; wìne.com (xn--wne-nma.com) sold for €31,001; and fìx.com (xn--fx-kja.com) sold for $46,001. These domains are not even worth the registration fee, yet because of their deception, they sold for unbelievable amounts.
Likely because of complaints to Sedo regarding the sale of these domains, they recently added an "IDN" tag to all IDNs listed for sale, as seen in the picture below.
However, they refuse to pull the names from sale, most probably due to the fact that they receive a 10% commission on all sales through their site.
In addition, promotion of these scam domains have been showing up frequently on the domain forum Namepros.com, as seen in this thread: tít.com thread.
Namepros owner -RJ- is aware of these promotional threads and is currently considering options on the proper way to handle future scam IDN threads.
As a domain industry, we have some responsibility to ensure the positive acceptance of our trade. By helping to put a stop to the sale and promotion of these worthless domains, we can add an air of credibility to the industry, a much needed boost in the wake of poor mass media representation as "cybersquatters," "phishers," "AdSense frauds" and "scammers."
If you have questions about IDNs or domains in general, or if you need guidance on the validity or translation of certain IDNs, please visit DNLocal.com, where the multi-lingual staff can assist you.
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