Hi Guys,
Thought I would respond to this post directly. I'm afraid the person who posted this is distorting the facts just a little bit. Prepare yourselves for a long recap:
1. Buyer (Juniper Park) writes to seller, sends an email basically saying "Here's an offer, you have 24 hours to take it or leave it."
2. The seller, who is a parking client, contacts us asking for assistance. They want to know if the offer is decent or not.
3. I reply, telling the seller that I think the offer is quite low (out of respect to everyone, I will not mention the domain name or the offer, just that it was a premium, generic, .info).
4. I also mention to the seller that I can pass the domain along to someone I know who recently purchased several .info's to see what kind of offer they might make. Free of commission, mind you.
5. To give the seller a reference, I mentioned that another seller recently came to us with a premium .info portfolio that they wanted assistance selling. For some reason, the buyer here got it in his head that we said WE just bought a large .info portfolio, and that we are lying. I still do not know why.
6. The seller writes me an angry email, claiming that we have poor business ethics because we are liars.
7. Several days later, we connect the seller to a new buyer, who offered approximately 8 times as much as Juniper Park did for the domain.
8. The domain is sold. We collect no commission on the deal.
While I understand Juniper Park might be unhappy that we broke up what would have been a steal for him, he paints this event as one where we harmed the seller of the domain, when in fact we helped our customer not only avoid a bad deal for a good domain, but get a far better one. The seller knew what they were getting into.
In fact, Juniper Park knew all of this, and about the successful sale, though he did not see fit to chime in and mention any of it.
I hope this clears things up a bit guys.
Ash from NameDrive
Ash â
Now that youâve publicly published the details of this transaction in DNJournal, please spare us the âout of respect to everyone, I will not mention the domain name or the offer â, BECAUSE YOU ASKED DNJOURNAL TO LIST IT LAST WEEK! Jeez!
The name in question is solar.info. Since you want to get into the sordid details, fine, letâs go there.
1) I won this domain at the drop last year â it was caught by DomainCatcher/Webagentur where I had an EXCLUSIVE backorder, and had dome business with them many times before. This drop catcher deals with .infos and charges a fee to enter backorder requests and charges a monthly fee to keep your backorder alive â and itâs one backorder per customer. The name was never placed into my account, and emails to support we ignored. WHOIS privacy was used to conceal the âownerâ identity. Months later I get an email saying âsome else reserved our whole backorder system that weekâ, which if true, would be fraud because they were billing me for the SAME service. But they are in Germany, so I canât sue them.
2) Fast forward to a few weeks ago â I see the WHOIS data is now public, registered to a corporation name but the address is a residence in Las Vegas. OK red flag
#1. The company name doesnât appear to be a Nevada corporation, and has no website or Google listings at all. Red flag
#2. They are using a throwaway gmail account for their business. Red flag
#3. So I email them asking if itâs for sale (not expecting an answer because all previous emails were ignored), I get a reply, but the name in the âfromâ header doesnât match the name the email is signed by, in fact not even the same gender. Red flag
#4.
3) Now Iâm really getting suspicious, so I make a low offer (I think it was $800, which is actually a HIGH initial offer for a .info. Unlike Ash, who shows his ignorance on the subject of domain negotiations on .infos, I own about 7,000 .infos and know that segment of the business.). Since I am very suspicious (4 warning flags), Iâm more looking at the type of response I get (a scammer will rush the transaction, reply from different accounts, forget his own name, etc). (Another note to Ash: professionals in the business world put time limits on offers; do you not know that?)
4) Now there is no response for a few days. Red flag
#5. I email a couple more times, and get a response (again, from this person with 2 different names) saying that they have been in contact with âAsh at Namedriveâ and direct quote from the sellerâs email: âAsh seems to be sitting on a nice package of premium .infos, so if you are interested in that, I can get you in touch...â Funny how Ash now says I âgot that in my headâ â no Ash, it sounds more like a lie you told the seller to get more business for yourself.
5) I reply that I know pretty much all of the premium .info domain owners, and never heard of Ash, and there is no âAshâ listed in the whois of any premium domains. I also know most of the brokers in the .info world, and never heard of Namedrive in connection with any large .info sales.
6) I get an email from Ash, telling me that he used to work at Sedo (during the time that half of my sales there turned out to be bogus buyers!), and he did not respond to my questions about WHAT premium .infoâs he owns, or even has brokered.
7) Fast forward to last week â I see the name listed in the âsalesâ column at DNJournal â but when I look up the WHOIS data, it is still unchanged from December 2006. DNJournalâs rules are that they only list sales AFTER the transaction is complete and WHOIS is changed. Ron tells me he got the information from â guess who - âAsh at Namedriveâ, and took his word for it even though the WHOIS tells a different story. Red flag
#6.
8) Today â 6 days after the transaction was supposed to be âcompletedâ, the whois has been changed to Sulla Tech Inc. , once again registered to a throwaway gmail address (red flag
#7), once again a âcorporationâ that is unknown to Google (red flag
#8), once again registered to a residential address (red flag
#9). Sure, it could be some brand new startup company in someoneâs garage, but brand new companies almost never pay top dollar for a new generic domain name (remember, this was a top dollar .info sale and made the charts), let alone a LOT of domain names (remember Ash says this same person ârecently purchased several .infosâ from him) (red flag
#10)
9) Letâs consider the timing for a moment. This seller has had the domain for a year, the whois is public since Dec 2006, and I exchange emails with the âownerâ on Apr 27 2007, who told me she had previously had many offers for the domain. The Emails stop that day. With this large expanse of time involved, what are the odds the Ash just happens to step in to discuss this name with her on the very day Iâm negotiating with her? Now add to that the odds that Ash happens to find a buyer that nobodyâs ever heard of within a couple of days (remember the name was for sale for at least 5 months). Now add to that the odds that this transaction is between two unheard of corporations, registered to residences, all using throwaway gmail accounts for mail. These incredible odds should be listed as red flag
#12.
10) Finally â Namedriveâs web site says: âOur commission fee is 10% of the final sales priceâ , yet Ash says there was no commission on the sale (red flag
#12). Do you work for free, Ash?
11) So now we have â letâs count them â 12 red flags of suspicious items. Any one of them, by itself, could possibly be explained or have no relevance. Maybe even 2 or 3 could be coincidence, but there are 11 red flags on this on situation â in other words, it stinks to high heaven.
Namedrive seems to have taken business ethics lessons from the folks at Registerfly. If you choose to do business with them, you should be very, VERY wary.
.
