Within the past week an hideous tale broke about fake bidding on one the the leading field name auction websites. Early versions of the tale claim an insider in one of the leading companies used an alias to bid on as many as 50,000 domains his company was auctioning off. The phony bids raised prices artificially, increasing this miscreant’s compensation. Details of the tale are still leaking in and I am not inside the news pipeline, so I will leave it to others to report developments.

In some of the blog comments scattered in various places some people are talking about class action lawsuits against various companies. In this case of this breaking tale there already is a lawfirm exploring the possibility of initiating a suit. The lawfirm has set up a field to collect information. The field is named [name of the suspect company]classactionlawsuit.com Whether or not they go forwards with an actual lawsuit depends on the information they gather, including whatever nuggets stray in at their .com field.

This sad tale and the actions of the law firm lit a lightbulb in my head. It gave me the thought for a whole new class of domains to make and invest in.

There are people and companies who invest in a wide class of domains with names such as [city]hotels.com Fill in the name of any well loved city and the potential to make a website with information about the hotels in that city falls into the field title-holder’s lap.

How about making a class of websites with the following type of name: [fill in the name of a company]classactionlawsuit.com ? Fill in, say, Microsoft or Chevron or whatever. The thought is that maybe some day some law firm might want to sue the company, so they would have to buy the name of the field from you. Clean, no?

For those who dislike field investors, using this practice might be the best example of predatory cybersquatting. On the other hand, this might just be a decent example of buying low and selling high.

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Tags: auction websites, domain name auction, fake bidding