Yeah, that may have been done at one time, several years ago. But that's been pretty much stopped at this point. As with any registrar, though, if you search for a domain, see it's available, then be prepared to buy it quickly or you might lose the chance to buy it.

In this case, a GoDaddy employee was bidding on their own domain auctions. They're allowed to use the "buy it now" and buy closeout domains, just not allowed to bid on the godaddy main auctions.

| Yeah, that may have been done at one time, several years ago. But that's been pretty much stopped at this point.

Not really, it happened to me two weeks back. The domain I searched for on GoDaddy was not available after 2 hours and when I did a who is look up it was registered by Synergy Wholesale Pty Ltd another registrar.

My suspect is that there could be some triggers that would go off based on the domain name you search and other parameters and then if its something they are interested in then it could probably automatically register it or send it to another registrar for registration via an api or something.

> Not really, it happened to me two weeks back. The domain I searched for on GoDaddy

Of course it not stopped, it is still happening and not only with mentioned registrar, one should never check potential good domains using godaddy and similar sites without buying it straight away, otherwise you might lose it or be scammed by having to buy it on higher price.

Did you try to resolve that domain at any point before it was registered?

Odds are that you got fucked by passivedns, not godaddy.

Yeah, for this reason I have the habit of using dig to check if the zone exists rather than touching any registrar infrastructure for search

I think it’s less of a problem now though. All of the valuable namespace is either in use or squatted already.

Wouldn't whois from the command line also be sufficient to avoid potential malfeasance?

Yeah, but I find dig faster since all the whois servers decided they needed to also return 10 pages of legal bullshit, and easier to check a bunch of possible domains in a loop. Whois is probably more up to date as zone updates are batched so it's possible something returns NXDOMAIN but has actually been registered.

How are you constructing your dig? Is a null dig result always an indication of an unregistered domain?

Usually something like this:

cat /tmp/wants.txt | while read d; do echo -n $d:; dig $d in ns | grep '>>HEADER<<' | awk '{print $6}'; done

You get NXDOMAIN if it doesn't exist. That doesn't necessarily mean you can register it though. Maybe it's expired but in the grace period, or some other kind of exits-but-disabled state. If it does exist it might be for sale. Anyway, for quickly checking what's probably unregistered from the shell this one liner works great. A whois query usually takes about a second. Dig takes about a tenth of a second, and DNS queries aren't rate limited like WHOIS.

dig from the command line seems like an excellent way to get caught by passivedns

Who cares? It's not like an invalid lookup is raising a big flag that I intend to register this domain so come on over and scalp it. Besides, there is ultimately no way to make these lookups other than plaintext.

Presumably the same people who worry about their registrars scalping them should also worry about the vast amounts of people with passivedns access scalping them.

You can make these queries via a trusted registrar, and the domains you query won’t be broadcast to the world in cleartext.