We see these things from time to time, remember DomainNames.com purchased for $2,577 by Yinan Wang and then Network Solutions said, yeah, NO!
Yinan went on to purchase DomainName.com and DomainNames.com was sold at NamesCon for $370,000 by Uniregistry.
A member at Namepros detailed his purchase of Warned.com
More info will be added later, but I will share main points now:
1. Today I bought .com name from @Uniregistry (on their site) for $xxxx;
2. Domain Registrant Organization: NAME ADMINISTRATION INC. (BVI) – REPORTED AS @Frank.Schilling, Uniregistry CEO;
3. Automatic PayPal payment, SSE, received domain instantly, Whois updated;
4. Changed nameservers to Dreamhost (domain was for my next project);
5. 2 hours later I received a short email regarding: “Registrant Change Approved” – NEVER REQUESTED;
6. Visited my Uniregistry account – DOMAIN IS MISSING;
7. Opened Whois, Registrant Organization: NAME ADMINISTRATION INC. (BVI) again – WITH MY NAMESERVERS;
8. Opened support ticket;
9. Started support chat;
10. Uniregistry staff Kirsty informed that: “Our market team have reached out and advised this domain was incorrectly sold. You will receive a refund within 24 hours.”;
11. I asked: “Please explain what does “was incorrectly sold” mean?”;
12. Reply: “This is all the information we have right now, however our market team management are currently working on this for you and we will be in touch shortly.”
Most of you probably think why Uniregistry acts so unprofessionally. The only answer that I can assume right now is that the same domain was listed on several other marketplaces for $18.2k, even this is not some top name (past tense verb). Domain is under NS1.UNIREGISTRYMARKET.LINK again.
I have tens of print-screens for this transaction, therefore, every point can be proved.
I will wait for their move or refund and will update the post accordingly.
The most interesting point is that the project/site for which I bought this domain will be related to online security, phishing, scams, etc. – VERY IRONIC situationNow I understand what Uniregistry means by “No one does domains like Uni.”
Have a nice day, everyone!
The domain is listed at Afternic for $18,200
One of the posters at Namepros speculated that maybe a decimal point was in the wrong place. The Namepros member stated they paid “x,xxx” was that $1,000 or $9,999?
Should Uniregistry have just honored the sale? When it’s Network Solutions doing this stuff people tend to get loud because most don’t care for Network Solutions.
This was not a Uniregistry customer, this name was owned by Frank Schilling’s Name Administration Inc.
I will point out the customer service rep said was incorrectly sold, not mispriced. Usually that’s what it means though. The name is for sale most places, Name.com marking Frank up their standard 15% https://www.name.com/domain/search/warned.com
So uniregistry cannot carefully check the price before putting name up for sale?Honor the sale.This is uniregistry owned by FS so lets hear what they got to say about their error.To me if a sale is not honored,they are in same league as networksolutions.
Wont be doing business with them and if they approach to buy my names,wont deal.Where is FS?Dont tell me he hasnt seen what is being said for days now.
Next thing would be to come up with their TOS to defend this act.
Will depend on terms of service. Shows the risk of fast transfer. Price definitely sounds like a mistake.
They made a mistake but the buyer kicked. UNI could have offered some kind of compensation to make him happy. The buyer is not stupid and underhands the domain was underpriced. I think if UNI approached him differently, he would be fair.
I recall Shane Cultra was very loud about his own mistake with Afternic — he made a typo when changed domain prices in bulk and the domain was sold well below its value on the same day. No one to blame.
There has been dozens of these over the years. Usually they do not keep the domain, depends on the TOS. I doubt anyone feels like handing out free lunches because someone started a thread about it.
I’m not sure if I was “loud” about it but I didn’t mind sharing my mid four, low five figure error. I uploaded a spreadsheet with 50X.com at $500 instead of $50,000. Got picked off in less than an hour. There are people looking for exactly this and I got caught. I hoped by making it public people would be a bit more careful. I would have gladly given the guy $1000 for returning it back which would have given him essentially free money for finding my error. He said no and I so I told him I wished back luck and karma on him for a lifetime. I can only imagine how terrible things have gone for him since 🙂 As for this domain. If I were Frank and I truly made a mistake I would offer the same thing. Money for his time and if he really wants the name I would give it to him. But I would hope that the buyer would understand mistakes do happen and take a grand or two for his time. But he’s certainly entitled to the name if he so chooses
Well said Shane.Why havent Frank said a word?You stood up and admitted your mistake and even offered money.Lets see what Uni and Frank will do.
The different is Shane could not get the name back. Offering money would have been the only option.
Shane, I did mean you were complaining too much (perhaps, i used the wrong word, sorry). I read your blog too much, lol. It gave me an impression you mentioned it few times.
*Didn’t mean! Bloody autocorrect on iPhone
It’s not like Frank is going to lose the house on this, he probably still would have made money on the deal, just not as much. This article being indexed probably cost them a lot more as now see saw customers see it, they will be like OMG, my name can be taken away just like that, screw that.
Not going to cost them 5 cents.
Reputation hits add up. People remember them.
Believe it or not this had happened to me before. And I recently purchased a premium domain name with an estibot of $85,000 (but I take estibot with a grain of salt). But i knew it was a pretty valuable domain name. So when I purchased it, I didn’t get excited. I had a strong feeling in my gut that the owner was going to say they made a mistake with the price. However, I waited and it was never reversed so Im lucky. But I had purchased a domain name before a long time ago, and then was told that the transaction was an error. It was not Uniregistry though it was Godaddy.
Also….$59.00 per inquiry + commissions? Are they stupid or what? They act like they are the only platform that broker domain names. I personally go to Sedo & Afternic anyways and stay away from Uniregistry & DomainNameSales
Some key points from the original post are:
“The only answer that I can assume right now is that the same domain was listed on several other marketplaces for $18.2k”
and
“I have tens of print-screens for this transaction, therefore, every point can be proved.”
So, it seems that the OP had reason to believe that something had gone wrong with the pricing, and hence the reason for making multiple screen captures in anticipation of a dispute.
“So uniregistry cannot carefully check the price before putting name up for sale?”
Unfortunately, there was a little more to it than that. Uniregistry was performing an account merge involving thousands of domain names that were distributed across multiple accounts. An unanticipated technical error during that account merge caused a failure of the pricing information to migrate with the domain names, and hence a large number of names – not just this one – were temporarily set to a default value by the system. The OP happened to have noticed this error, and that the price information had not yet propagated to other platforms, at that particular moment while it was in the process of being corrected.
Uniregistry decided to reverse the sale due to technical error, in accordance with the Uniregistry Marketplace terms, and to refund the purchaser. I understand that there was a remaining issue with payment processing fees which is being ironed out.
And the beat goes on.
Anyone remember that? Sonny and Cher?