Have you chacked your Sedo account lately?????

[gimpydog]

The reason I ask is because a domain was removed from my account on 24 May (the day GDPR kicked off) and, long story short, I ended up trying to buy it back!

Sedo were proper useless. When I questioned the "seller's" right to list my domain, they initially said this...

Eventually, I gave them enough clues as to who really owned the domain & they returned it to my account. When I pressed for an explanation, they came up with this...

Read that again, carefully. You would think that, if Sedo were unable to establish the identity of the new "owner", the default position would be to maintain the status quo & ask for further evidence.

Apparently not. If you are a 'good' customer with an address in a tax-haven, you can list any domain you like, regardless of whether you own it, or not.

So, if you have domains listed for sale at Sedo, but don't login very often, you might want to check they are still safe in your account & not being sold off by some shady character hiding behind a brass plate in Belize.

You have been warned.

 

[gimpydog]

You couldn't make it up...

 

[Admin]

SEDO are unimpressive in most regards unfortunately. When a buyer backs out of an agreed deal you realise just how bad, SEDO has no teeth, their contract counts for nothing and they do nothing to force the contracted buyer to 'buy', you are on your own.

 

[gimpydog]

Funny you should say that...

They expect me to take legal action in Belize, but can't be bothered to ban these shysters from their platform.

I've had an account with Sedo for 15 years. When it was run by people who were trying to build a business, it was a good firm to deal with. I remember emailing a director to get things sorted when a deal went bad. It was sorted within 24hrs.

Now it is just another corporate blob. Only interested in where the next buck is coming from.

 

[gimpydog]

So here we are, a little more than 3 months later & yesterday Sedo removed the same domain from my account.

Today I have 'bought' it back again - a snip at just €5999 - and guess what, the seller is the same shyster as last time! - you couldn't make it up, could you?

Let's see how long it takes for the penny to drop this time 'round - either with Sedo or the seller - & whether Sedo will again claim the seller had passed their piss poor "owner verification process".

In the meantime, I would advise everyone to check for domains that have been wrongly removed from their Sedo account.

If you are about to buy a domain from Sedo or

R Q Domains Ltd,
New Horizon Building,
Ground Floor, 3 1/2 Miles Philip S. W. Goldson Highway.
Belize City,
Belize

(aka royalqueendomains.com, royalqueendomains.co.uk & probably, in reality, Austria based but with addresses in Gibraltar & Cyprus too)

then I would strongly suggest you robustly verify ownership & perform proper due diligence before parting with any money.

The sellers (R Q Domains Ltd) have also listed my domain for sale at undeveloped.com, so if you intend to buy a domain from there, best check the seller is the genuine domain owner, as the site owners don't seem too bothered about small details like that!

 

[gimpydog]

I'ts been five months now, but I just bought my domain from Sedo for the third time! The good news is, the price hadn't gone up.

I suspect the seller is the same outfit as before (the ones with the brass plate shell company in a tax haven), but this time they are using a newish account at Sedo in their own name.

So watch out for...

Evolution Media e.U.

Egg 18
9624 Egg bei Hermagor
Austria

Tax ID: ATU61376834

..who have kindly still left it listed at undeveloped.com too.

How disorganised an outfit do Evolution Media e.U. & Sedo have to be to allow the same mistake to happen three times? I do have to wonder if Sedo ever spoke to them about it, or whether 'anything goes' with these large portfolio holders?

To see how hopeless Sedo have become since United Internet took over, look at the 'quiz' you are presented with when you purchase a domain...

...Maybe something was lost in translation?

 

[RobM]

Sedo will be gone by the end of the year. They cannot stop fraud nor do they want to.

 

[Nigel]

I'm sorry to hear of your problems but I have to make some defence of sedo from personal experience. As I've said before we've dealt with sedo since 2003 and have experienced very few problems apart from non payers - but you get bad payers everywhere. They still dominate sales charts on dnjournal.com every week and I think they're still the biggest marketplace with 19m domains listed. I'm sure there will be instances where they get it wrong but, as I've said before, we've tried many other platforms and for ease of bidding/counterbidding and collection of money they have always been the best.

Things seem to be picking up as well on sedo. In the last week or so we have had approx 6 offers and 2 sales. Things aren't anywhere near as good as they were 5 years ago, but our portfolio is a lot smaller, and as I've said before the ease of dealing with sedo means you can get on with other things - like developing domains or having other employment.

We have had hundreds of purchase and sale transactions with sedo over 15 years, and we've been paid for every single domain transferred, and we have received the domain for every purchase made. That's why we continue using them.

 

[martin-s]

Good riddance to them!

 

[RobM]

The issue isn't the last 15 years Nigel, It is how they've acted since the whois changes. They've undone their whole business in less than a year and I would be VERY wary about buying domains on their platform now.

 

[Nigel]

I'll certainly keep a watch on things but on a lot of these stories there's a lot more to them when you dig below the surface. There are always going to be con people trying to pull a fast one on domains. That will happen on all platforms and probably on all escrow services. Sometimes the buyer has to use a bit of common sense if they're spending 5 or 6 figures on a .com (this doesn't seem to be an issue with the .co.uk market). At least you can see how long the seller has been selling on sedo - so with us buyers can see we've been selling since 2003 with a five bar selling record.

 

[RobM]

A buyer sees a domain listed at sedo. He negotiates a price with the seller. Sedo takes his money and sends it to the seller. The seller transfers the domain but it's not his and gets taken back. Yet in this scenario you think it's the *buyer* who has to use a bit of common sense? Um ok. The only way to use any common sense would be to completely remove Sedo from the scenario and deal directly with the seller.

 

[Nigel]

dealing direct is fine if you trust the seller and are ok with parting with a large sum before being transferred the domain. Escrow does at least get the domain transferred to you before the seller gets paid. This .com case is where the domain was previously stolen. Does any escrow service guarantee that a domain has not been stolen in the past?

 

[RobM]

If you cannot guarantee sales on your marketplace when you take a HUGE commission then you should bear the responsibility for fraud, or spend a few dollars and make a few phonecalls, or stop offering the 'service. What exactly are people paying for? Use of a website?
Escrow services assume buyer and seller have been in touch with each other - they are usually not, nor do they claim to be, marketplaces. Sedo won't let you speak to the seller directly therefore it is up to *them* to provide the service they are being paid for.

However here could be a set of rules for sedo to look at:

1) Purchase a whois history. There are places that do this for a few dollars.
2) Note the registrar - hmmmm network solutions (usually).. notorious for high value domain thefts.
3) I'm assuming they would have more contacts with registrars than we do - check the last updated date and what happened.
4) Anything worth a lot of money will have an email and contact details *before* gdpr. Phone the previous owner and ascertain they sold it.

This is just a few things I can think of off the top of my head - there are more - which, for 4/5 figures commission you might bother to do. Alternatively stop offering a marketplace or, better still, stop taking a fee. You cannot assume people paying for their service are hardened and wise domain owners. Endusers buy from sedo (apparently) all the time - where is their protection?

This is also ignoring the fact that sedo is pretty pointless now for enduser sales. As I have seen with my parking service people will get in touch directly via the domain if you have a domain they want. Then at least you can perform your own due diligence and at no expense.

 

[ian]

I bought a domain where the seller wanted to use Sedos escrow service (it wasn't advertised on Sedo so the rate was 3%). Despite my hesitancy I have to say it went smoothly, all done in a matter of days, including the use of a foreign currency which accounted for most of the timescale. The only peculiarity was that Sedo confirmed the domain was transferred I assume solely off the basis of a registrar change, as they can't see the whois. The seller could easily have just sent it to themselves, somewhere else! You'd need to react fast in that case from the time it notifies you of a successful transfer.