DomainLore Blog

The report you are going to see in this post was sent to Nominet on the 9th of December, 2019

It was subjected: 9 Bulgarian TAGs actively violating “Anti-avoidance and Connected Persons” rules.

Now, this report was updated to include 13 active TAGs and 5 dormant(?). All registered (and run) on the iniative of a one single person.

These TAGs are actively catching expired domains with valuable backlinks and traffic. These domains are worth much more than your LLLs you might be obsessed about.

However, this Bulgarian group has now largely monopolised catching of such valuable .uk domains, while openly abusing Nominet policies of “Connected persons”.

Not only this is a close circle of employees and friends of their mastermind - Kalin Karakehayov, but all their activities are financially benefiting one single person (or one company) and they are not even able to hide that.

This post is about Web Consultancy Ltd and Stephen Hall

During RoR .uk drops I saw WEBCON tag but was unaware who was behind it.

“Web Consultancy Ltd”, I didn’t come across this company before.

(Later I learned and for many it was well-known from RobM public forum posts on Acorn, that WEBCON was his first business partner, whose TAG wins he bragged as attributable to him as he run RoR release catches through (thanks to a Nominet deposit provided by Web Consultancy)).

But I didn’t know Stephen Hall was related to WEBCON.

Stephen was actively buying RoR domains on DL and we talked about some other sales.

In September he wrote to me:

Is anyone going to talk about cheaters and ghost TAGs in 2020?

There seems to be an army of cheaters swirling around UK Backorder and RobM’s catching service.

First, cheaters who shill bid. A lot of shill bidders (and some other dishonest sellers) who was banned from DomainLore have successfully moved to auction their wares on UK Backorder and are well alive there.

Quality controls on that platform seem to be lacking a lot (if they even exist). It looks like everything goes, when there is an urgency to attract as many buyers and sellers. Nobody wants to auction their domains cheap when the bidders are limited. (And I can tell it takes ages to establish a thriving community and hundreds of hours to purify it).

(Not trying to discredit a competitor, but am genuinely interested if UK Backorder owner would act by banning shill bidders from his platform if proof of their past activities is provided?)

The catchers using RobM’s ‘hosted chasing’ software are, however, forced to sell on the provider’s auction platform, so that the owner receives his part of profits for providing ‘hosted’ service. This provides a level of genuine auction’s activity.