Domain aftermarket and auction platform, Pheenix, received a barrage of unsavory comments over at NamePros.
Coming fresh from the drop of several of its satellite registrars, Pheenix appears to have angered a customer, who claims they are “warehousing customers’ expired domains.”
The Pheenix customer is livid over the fact that his winning bid did not count.
According to the exchange at popular domain forum, NamePros:
“I recently won forexspot.com in the expired auction for this domain. However, Pheenix did not deliver and have informed me that they do not intend to deliver the domain to me. […]
But it turns out that Pheenix are warehousing the expired domains of their customers.
I already knew that they have their own domain portfolio, but I was not aware that they are cherry-picking domains from their users expired domains.
I think in this case they should have owed up to their “mistake” and delivered the domain to me, rather than still go ahead and warehouse it, as I won it in an auction run by them. But completing their own auctions and maintaining the integrity of their own platforms is apparently not important to them.”
As it turns out, Pheenix claimed that the domain was auctioned off by mistake. Forexspot.com is now listed as a premium domain at Pheenix, with an $18,995 dollar price tag, as seen below:
Some say this is a typical case of domain warehousing, a legal, yet fringe practice of domain registrars to stockpile domains of customers that expired, in order to auction them off, or sell them at increased prices. The normal course of things, would be to release these domains back to the availability pool.
Pheenix appears to have other “forex” domains in its 15,000-strong domain portfolio, per below:
forexadvisor.org
forexate.com
forexbeast.com
forexdigital.com
forexeo.com
forexhandbook.com
forexspot.com
forexstate.com
