GoDaddy Glitch: Auctions My Domain for $2,000

Before I go on and on with this post…let me tell you that this all turned out OK (hopefully) and that Tracey from GoDaddy provided amazing customer service.

So here goes this strange story…

After wrapping up a VERY looooong day of Kickify work and clearing dinner, I get a call from an unknown number. Normally, I would have let it go to voice mail, but picked it up. The call went something like this,

“This is Paul from Chicago, I am with a company and we just purchased your domain name kickify.com. We were going to launch a product with your domain. We looked around the web and saw that your brand was very much alive and well as we saw you were active today on Twitter just 6 hours ago, Facebook and have a website. The auction states, that I should be taking possession of your domain soon. Can you login to your account and check your auctions (he kindly walked me through it and no record of it appeared) now. OK, I am going to call GoDaddy now and I suggest you do the same and we will meet back to see what has happened. You have my number.”

Immediately, I called GoDaddy and got Tracey on the phone. She looked into my personal Auction records and in the Auction records of GoDaddy and saw nothing with Kickify. She thought it was possibly a scam and they may be looking for me to purchase back my own domain. She did suggest I consider making my domain private and we started that purchase. Then, Paul beeped in and I put GoDaddy on hold. We chatted for a few and he said he did indeed purchase it as he just verified with GoDaddy. He asked if we could do a 3 way call to get this resolved. Tracey was absolutely shocked when she accessed his account and saw that one of GoDaddy’s partners had indeed put my domain up for bid and sold it to Paul for $2,000. Paul and I had to hold a few times and we chatted away over the horrible GoDaddy waiting music while Tracey investigated and got additional help.

Paul was promised a full refund, my domain was confirmed as mine and it should be fine as it was already locked. We were both told there would be follow-up emails on the investigation. After a bit, Tracey called me back and GoDaddy offered me free “Private Registrations” for all my sites. While she was doing this, I opted to buy the .co and .org as I already own the .biz and .net. Heck, if this name was good enough to buy for 2K – I better darn well protect my “kick ass” brand.

What would have happened if Paul never contacted me? We will never know. Could the glitch that sold him my domain have let him have access to it and ruined my company? Well…thank goodness this was taken care of and he is not out that money and I safely have my company domain again. But, this whole situation reminded me how vulnerable we are on the internet.

Happy ending and now Paul and I are connected on LinkedIn.