Weeks ago Google came out and addressed the topic of expired domain names. On their blog “TheKeyword” they wrote:

Expired domain abuse

Occasionally, expired domains are purchased and repurposed with the primary intention of boosting search ranking of low-quality or unoriginal content. This can mislead users into thinking the new content is part of the older site, which may not be the case. Expired domains that are purchased and repurposed with the intention of boosting the search ranking of low-quality content are now considered spam.

Search helps people with billions of questions every day, but there will always be areas where we can improve. We’ll continue to work hard at keeping low-quality content on Search to low levels, and showing more information created to help people.

4 days later BTC123.com closed at $224,000 at GoDaddy auctions.

Today SearchEngineRoundtable.com published an article that people can now report these sites to Google if they like.

Barry Schwartz wrote,

As a reminder, the site reputation abuse policy is being enforced with manual actions right now it is not yet algorithmic.

So now you can report these spam methods to Google, if you really want to.

A commenter made a good point that now competitors can report you to harm your business. Someone could very well purchase an expired domain and create even better content. Now they might have to worry about a competing site reporting it as expired domain abuse.