GoDaddy caught one of its employees bidding on its domain name auction

GoDaddy, one of the biggest registrars in the industry, has come up clean regarding an ethics issue from the inside. It is revealed by GoDaddy that they have found one of its employee bidding on a domain name auction. However, the issue is because the employee was bidding on GoDaddy’s domain name auction.

This is obviously against GoDaddy’s terms and conditions as no employee from the company is allowed to bid for domain names on its own platform. Same goes for any other company which is running auctions on its own platform.

One of the main reasons for this is that being an employee, he will be able to influence the bidding process. The employee would be able to find out the lowest, highest and average bid and will bid accordingly. This was revealed by Paul Nicks who is the VP & GM for GoDaddy’sAftermarket in a blog post.

However, we would have not known about this issue had one customer not complained to GoDaddy. One of GoDaddy auction buyers contacted the company to investigate about multiple employees who were bidding on their platform itself. The customers accused them of shill bidding which is a bid to increase the minimum price of any domain so as to boost the auction higher.

The customer went on to accuse that their employee was giving out insider information to auction bidders. This is also a concern as the auction buyer can make a calculated investment on the same. Once GoDaddy started the investigation, they found out the account of employee who was running it on a name different from his business name.

However, GoDaddy also mentions that the employee did not give out any insider information to any person outside of GoDaddy. Also, they did not find the employee to be doing shill-bidding of any kind on its platform.

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