Well, it's turned into a 1000-post monster. The highlights are..
Andrew Rosener [mediaoptions.com] says he did NOT engage in shill bidding - there were merely "mistaken and accidental instances......where we bid on a name we were selling without knowing"
Andy Booth [booth.com] says he did NOT engage in shill bidding - "There was a misunderstanding......I naively wasn't fully aware of the TOS at NJ"
Oliver Hoger [virtual real estate ltd.] says he did NOT engage in shill bidding - "I have a automated bidding system......Im trying to fix to be able to exclude all my domains"
NameJet say they did NOT encourage shill bidding, despite their platform actually
allowing users to bid on their own auctions - "We obviously do not condone any kind of shill bidding on NameJet, so we take this very seriously"..."there are not many domains involved, so it is not some large coordinated campaign to improperly inflate auction values"..."We
do not tolerate any kind of shill bidding at all"..."our position is clear –
it is never allowed on NameJet!".
That last statement is alarming. It emerged in the thread that
TLDPros [TLDPros.com] most certainly DID engage in shill bidding, but weren't banned by NameJet &
Oliver Hoger admitted to bidding on his own auctions using a second account & is
alleged to have bid on
148 of his own auctions using his primary account, but wasn't banned either.
Prima facie, it would appear that NameJet have a very high tolerance of shill bidding.
The offenders were not barred from the auctions, neither were the poor victims who overpaid as a result ever reimbursed, or compensated by NameJet. They played it down. Nothing to see here. Money talks!
If you want to get a flavour of things, I would recommend reading this one
post.