Originally posted by snoopy
Some other commentary on it,

"Will we see others follow suit and sell, first at cost, and later at loss? .Mobi is a true case-study of crowd mentality. There were three domain heavyweights in the first auction (Rick Schwartz, Anything.com’s Larry Fischer and partners, and Webmagic founder Greg McLemore) that set the tone for many speculators to follow. The speculators thought the three knew something more then others (hack, some between the three thought the same on each other as well) and all hell broke loose."

http://www.conceptualist.com/?p=645

""""The rest of the story about this I cannot disclose, but maybe Rick will one day, maybe he won’t."""""""


whats this mean rom their??????

My gut feeling is this is someone who went it way too deep and perhaps doesn't have a lot of financial stability. It really makes me wonder about people with what sounds like limited finances spending 200k on highly speculative names.

I think the biggest losers from this are probably the other bidders who won auctions that had to pay more due to this non payer.

to relieve all the speculation and rumor, the reason for the reach out on these is because the buyer is an investor group out of Sri Lanka. Although I have dealt with them before, there was an increased delay in having funds released from their bank (or from any bank from that country for that matter) due to increased security and terrorist funding investigations.

we do not take any chances and do not want to delay the transactions any longer than what is considered normal processing procedures so the buyer agreed to accept at cost resales while we have the names in escrow or as they were in process.

All but 4 names have now been resold at the auction reserves, preserving the integrity of the domain values and the process. We have lined up back ups and do line up back ups in case of adverse situations and it helped in this case and kept the industry's reputation in tact.

that was the key initiative of this particular group of names. Hopefully you all can appreciate that no one wants any failed transactions from these types of sales. Its good for each and every one of you not to have a sale go bad and these will not go bad due to our efforts.

Thanks for the background Monte.

Originally posted by mcahn

All but 4 names have now been resold at the auction reserves

monte, does that mean the names sold for the same amount they sold for at traffic?

yep...we would never try to sell for more in this situation.

Thanks Monte. I'm just asking because the wording made it sounds like they were sold at their reserves which could mean that they sold for less than what they ultimately sold for at traffic - unless the sold prices happened to be the reserves as well. Just want to make sure I have the right sale prices for a sales list.

I meant their exact sale prices at auction so that all sides are the same.

Thanks Monte.

It is unfortunate they cannot get their money out, but this does set a bad precedent. This is twice recently that name(s) have been "returned". Are the buyers that impatient to receive funds? Surely the money could be recovered eventually?

this is the first time this has happened and we are not even late in processing.

Cowboys.com doesn't count?

I'm not faulting you or moniker, I just think you're being quite lenient.

no cowboys.com does not count. that was our choice to allow them out due to their total lack of understanding of what happened......and the silent auction was still going on so we just put it back up for auction. that is different than what just happened.

now there is only these names left:



Shopping.mobi $55,000.00
ZIPCodes.mobi $8,000.00
jewelry.mobi $15,730.00

all others sold

I read on another forum one guys expression of disappointment because he couldn't buy news.mobi and price.mobi as they had already been resold and he was too late. Dang, I guess you gotta be quick.