Front-Running in Domain Bids
I wonder why Wall Street didn’t think of this first? Front-running taken to the domain name market:
Recently, SnapNames discovered that an employee had set up an account on the SnapNames system under a false name and, under this name, bid in SnapNames auctions. This is a clear violation of our internal policy and was not approved by the company. We deeply regret that this conduct has impacted our customers.
Extent of impact
This conduct affected a small percentage of SnapNames auctions:
* Bidding affected approximately five percent of total SnapNames auctions since 2005, most of which occurred between 2005 and 2007.
* The incremental revenue from the bidding represented approximately one percent of SnapNames’ auction revenue since 2005.No matter the level of impact, SnapNames takes this matter extremely seriously. When the matter was discovered, the company immediately closed the account in question and began a thorough investigation. The employee has also been dismissed from the company.
SnapNames further discovered that, on certain recent and limited occasions, when the employee won an auction, the employee secretly arranged to refund from SnapNames to the fictitious account a portion of the winning bid amount.
