Will NameJet support an independent third party investigation? I sure hope so…

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Unless you’ve literally been living on a rock, with no wifi, and your smartphone isn’t handy, then you know that shill bidding at NameJet has been a very hot topic in the domain industry. If you’re behind on what’s been happening, here’s the thread on NamePros that will get you all caught up.

Now I don’t have all the facts and as someone that has been a fan of NameJet for years I do think they are going to do the right thing here. The question is, what is the right thing?

Currently NameJet is doing their own internal investigation and they’ve been updating the community on their progress, here’s one of the latest responses courtesy of Elliot’s Blog:

“In an effort to keep everyone current as to where we stand on this matter, I wanted to share the following update. There have been some inaccuracies and misconceptions that have been brought forth by such a spirited discussion. And it would be a challenge to respond to all of them – therefore, I want to bring the discussion back to the heart of the matter.
As stated earlier, we take the issue of shill bidding on NameJet very seriously and we are conducting a thorough investigation, keeping in mind that the integrity of our platform is of utmost importance to us. As I have said repeatedly, we do not condone shill bidding of any kind. We would never encourage, promote or otherwise be involved in any such thing and our position is clear – it is never allowed on NameJet!
In our current investigation certain auction activity has come to light that we deem questionable and a possible violation of our terms. This kind of activity is not acceptable to us and we are taking steps to deal with it. We have suspended several accounts while working through the information we have available.
I thank everyone for their patience as we work through these issues. Our goal is to best serve our customers and we are working hard to that effect.” (Source – DomainInvesting.com)

Elliot has also been a proponent of having a third party investigate the issues here and to be honest, I think that really is the only path forward if they want to win back the trust of the domain name community. Like I said in a post earlier this week, I don’t think there are any situations where bidding on your own domains are okay, and action should be taken to ban accounts that do this.

Still at the core of this issue is trust, trust for a service that many of us have trusted for years. I hope, more than anything, that at the end of all of this it will actually make NameJet an even stronger and more trustworthy place to buy and sell domain names. But like I said above, to do this I think we need to move beyond an internal investigation and let a third party jump in to really dig into what is going on.

What do you think? Is an internal investigation enough or should a third party get involved? Comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton