*******Warning! Warning! Warning!*******

[Bill Roy]

I was hoping not to have to make this post, but unfortunately I have too.

Earlier this month I was Bushwhacked, one of my parked domains with Afternic.com was subjected over two days to 540 visits resulting in an unbelievable 186,758 click throughs. Absolutely rediculous of course. Unfortunately I did not spot this straight away due to Afternic's lackness in updating results, but as soon as the results appeared I contacted Afternic by telephone and brought the matter to their attention (they already had flagged it of course).

I agreed immediately that this was fraudulent activity and that I was not entitled to any payment for these click throughs. I was then assured that their (Afternic's) backroom boys would chase the person responsible for this attempt at wire fraud (a federal crime in the US punishable by up to 20 years in a Federal Prison). I was told by the Afternic representative that he would be in contact within the week to update me. During that week I telephoned and spoke to the representative who assured me they were working on it, I even offered to assign the domain name to Afternic to help catch the culprit, but this offer was never taken up.

Today I emailed the representative asking for an update, and if they could not identify the culprit then the IP addresses involved. I have recieved the following reply:

HI Bill,

Unfortunately we are not allowed to give out IP addresses, and there is no way XXXXXX.XXX can be allowed back on the platform after what has happened.

We certainly apologize for this, but there really isn’t anything more we can do.

Best,

(I have omitted the signature to save identifying the individual representative who was presumably only acting under instructions.)

This means that Afternic are willing for me to lose the income from a domain name and take no action against the culprit and thus protect not only me, Yahoo (whose adverts they use), themselves, but also every other domainer who has names parked with them from such an attack in the future.

This makes me totally sick in my stomach that one of the biggest parking companies in the world just roles over and actually protects the criminal and makes the innocent suffer, and leaves other innocent people likely to be the victims of such an attack again in the future.

Now this has totally confirmed my opinion that at least some 'parking companies' look after themselves, even rather protecting criminals than those who legitimately park their domains with them.

Please be warned that Afternic would rather see an innocent domainer lose their investment than help bring a criminal to justice. I know justice is meant to be blind but with the ethos of Afternic justice has its hands tied behind its back and is meant to kneel on the floor.

Bill
(BillBo)

 

[Theo]

Come to Sedo, they only pay for one click per visit, per IP

 

[tas38]

It's a shame but that is the way it work all the time, they had to use a program of some kind. But then again, may be it was some thing on their side that did it. If they can not control that kind of stuff, then it's time to think about moving your domains.

We are also open to that stuff, with adsense and yahoo accounts. I'm sure they will boot anyone, that it happen to by closing their accounts. It just goes to show, how much these places can't control and take the easy way out. Even when it hurts people unfairly doing so, their bottom line is all that matter to them.