Momentum said:
The private drop catchers have to be in tight with an ICANN-accredited registrar to be able to do this. Because most registrars do not allow refunds for registrations and even fewer will allow for thousands of refunds per day
Actually these "private" dropcatchers are ICANN accredited registrars in their own right. They compete with the big dropcatchers at the drop and generally pick up any desireable name which the big players don't capture. They can "taste" them for 5 days before paying for them or returning them to the registry.
GoDaddy are quite good at capturing a domain which is "tasted" and then dropped again. All the big boys are concentrating on the initial drop whilst GoDaddy is always monitoring the domain. These are rare circumstances indeeed, but they happen. Ask thewindmaster and Eugene V
EugeneV said:
I backordered a domain previously registered with GoDaddy and they failed to capture it! Now I see that someone else has it registered with YOUDAMAIN.COM. How is it possible? Doesn't GoDaddy have priority over its own drop?
I've seen somebody else complain at the same thing on another forum. The only explaination I could come up with was it went to auction and you didn't receive any notification from GD, then someone else won it at auction. However, this explanation doesn't apply in your case, because you still received the domain after it had been dropped and tasted.
This is maybe looking like a hole in Godaddy system where in some cases the domain being monitored gets dropped instead of being passed over to tdnam for auction.