Is this right?

[archibel]

I don't understand this - jp.com sold today for $1,100 - am I missing something?

http://www.sedo.co.uk/auction/auction_history.php?auction_id=124699&partnerid=19833

 

[websaway]

Sedo would have made it clear that you were not buying jp

 

[archibel]

Its actually this domain:

http://xn--p1a1c.com/

You've made me feel better about missing out on the auction - but I don't understand why would anyone (3 people according to the bid history) would want to even register this domain...let alone pay $1.1K for it.

Is it SEDO testing the website or something?

 

[cm1975]

Is it not something to do with non-Latin alphabet characters which means xn--p1a1c.com is equivalent to jp.com in Japan or somewhere similar?

 

[dotNetFreak]

It's an IDN...


http://www.charset.org/punycode.php?encoded=xn--p1a1c.com&decode=Punycode+to+normal+text

 

[Edwin]

Sedo is very, very, very bad at highlighting all the scammy domains where people have faked a normal-looking domain using a different (IDN) character set. There's just a brief note which is easily overlooked.

IDN domains definitely have their own place - we have over 2,000 in inventory, after all, most of which get traffic - but only if they're used the way they're meant to be i.e. all 1 language, with characters of that language (e.g. Chinese for a Chinese IDN, Japanese for a Japanese IDN etc.)

Where they go flaky is when scammers mock up an English-ish domain using character sets that have characters very "similar" to English ones, but just different enough to be utterly worthless.

 

[Simon]

few other in there at the moment.
Ie characters resembling xs (currently at $5000) and ja
would be interesting to see if the whois changes on these.