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I can. I used to work at GoDaddy and they have an "Executive Domain Team" that is basically just a fancy word for a group of people that assist domain kiters. If you search for a domain on GoDaddy's whois, they put a hold on it and publish the list to potential domain "investors" (read: kiters) who then have the option of purchasing it out from under you. These are people that literally invest thousands of dollars to buy up domains on the off chance that they can resell them at a profit. Anytime there's a sunrise period on a new domain TLD, these guys go in and buy all the popular and common names wholesale and they have a dedicated person that works at GoDaddy to help them do this.

Anytime you have a question about whether something is a scam or not, just ask yourself where the money is. In this case, it's in GoDaddy making money off of any time a domain name is sold, re-sold, auctioned, or if it changes hands. It's where the majority of their money made comes from, outside of services where people just don't know that better alternatives exist.

This sounds exactly like what happened to me. I had a few .london domains in one of the early stages of the TLD launch. Sat there for about 60 days, and then all of a sudden - gone.

GD support were useless and I lost out on a few quality domain names. Never used them again since. In fact, I don’t even think I got my money back!

This is a known trick of many registrars, but GoDaddy has to be the leader. Happened to me on two occasions as well. Recently it's supposed to be a bit cracked down on as they have strict quotas on how many domains they can reserve without outright buying.

As for my case, it was a couple years ago where they would also host a small site redirecting to the auction. It states that it is owned by some XYZ entity, but if you peel enough layers of the onion scheme you can get to their name.

You can read more about the practice and measures here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_front_running

Drop to a bash shell and do this: $ whois example.com

It's what I've always turned to first for availability. Super fast and less chance of a middleman grabbing it because you expressed interest.

Doesn’t give you the price though which is one of the things people are looking for when searching for a domain and if it’s not one of the popular TLDs where you already know a ballpark figure.

You misunderstand. Command line 'whois' is how you search for a domain initially. If it is available, the price is the standard price for a domain in that TLD. If it's already owned, you learn that also. Then you can visit www or visit the registrar to see if it is for sale and for how much.

You can also search on domains.google.com. They are known to not engage in these practices.

No I didn't. You are saying the same thing as I did but if it's a TLD where you don't know a ballpark figure you'll have to look it up somewhere to see the price which is some registrar like GoDaddy for a lot of people (especially those that don't know much about what's going on in the background).

Availability is not the only factor that people look at when they first decide on a domain. Especially if it's a side project / startup and not a bigger project where it doesn't matter if it's 9.99 / year or 500 / year.

Ok, so use ‘whois mydomain.tld’ to check availability, then google “.tld price” or “otherdomain.tld price” to check the cost without identifying your domain.

I also have no proof, but I have heard enough other stories like this one that I firmly belief something is going on. Using GoDaddy to check if a domain is available is a good way to make that domain become unavailable.

If anyone needs to do the same thing, use this one: https://whois.icann.org

unfortunately icann uses google for captcha.

Are you a robot?

If you enable anti-fingeprinting option in firefox you basically forced to spend minutes on google captcha training minefield. And sometimes you never pass it, it just refresh tiles indefinitely.

I also had this experience once a few years ago (2011 or 2012). I found it extremely suspicious and spent a few days running a some experiments. I came up with a list of domains and watched what happened after a GoDaddy search: some (but not all) of my domains were suddenly purchased by a GoDaddy organization. Literally all of the ones that were purchased were available again after a few days (I assume this has to do with the grace period).

Since then I don't type any candidate domain into any registrar / online tool unless I'm ready to purchase.

This is called domain kiting or "tasting"[0]. The founder of Go Daddy decried the idea a decade ago[1]. Of course this was after running their own kiting operation for some time using ad placement via Google Ad Sense for Domains (no content necessary, just a domain name). I know, because I worked on the app that serviced 20M domains and fed metrics back to the team that decided to buy or release. The project was shuttered after some employee abuse (buying the domains for themselves) and shortly before Bob declared the moral high ground.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting

1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20070707203924/http://www.bobpar...

Did Bob Parsons declare the moral high ground while standing on the back of an elephant he murdered?

https://gawker.com/5787676/meet-godaddys-ridiculous-elephant...

You should find a registrar that does not engage in this behavior. I use gandi.net. I pay almost twice as much as the cheapest registrars charge but I never have to worry about how they are going to treat me.

This isn't limited to Godaddy. A friend of mine tried to register a domain name on Network Solutions way back when they were still called that. He typed in his credit card number wrong. By the time he got an e-mail stating the transaction failed, someone else had already registered his domain.

My impression is that a domain checker works as a password checker: each domain/password inserted gets listed in a database. In case of domains, a simple script is enough to skim them and get the 'gold'. In case of passwords, even if the password was unique, after checking it won't be anymore..

I seem to remember a time (probably over a decade ago) where Netsol actually admitted this, tried to defend it, then eventually backed down and said that they would stop doing it. I've always used command-line whois to check for available domains since then, never had one snatched up either.

The same thing happened to me some years ago!

It was a trendy .com domain that was available, naively I didn't grab it right away, 2 days latter I went to purchase it, it was taken..