The most interesting part of the story is that it was not halvarez.
This bidder is no more showing at 2009, I think I still remember the nickname, but I may very well be mistaken, so I'll not post it on public
That is extremely relevant, I am shocked that the supposedly street smart domainers on this forum are going along with the ludicrous idea that he used only one account.
If you were the guy who had built the system and were dealing with a huge number of auctions, would you use only one account? Why?
Remember, he had access to EVERYTHING. He had inside knowledge of each domain's traffic and the level of interest, both from people searching for that domain on his system and the number of back orders, stretching right back to the founding of the company. More importantly, he could piggyback on the eyes, minds and accumulated expertise of tens of thousands of domainers. He could track individual users, like the owner of a stock exchange keeping tabs on the most successful investors - we did the research and made the picks, he got to come along for the ride. We all pay attention to domains that seem to be attracting bidders, but his inside access allowed him to automate that, to jump on in even when a single bid was placed at the last-minute.
Given that he had that level of opportunity, do you seriously think he would concentrated all that advantage into just one account? Are you nuts?
Halvarez is the account he used to participate in 5% of auctions, and it certainly seems to be the one that generated the most suspicion, but he almost certainly spread his activities wider than that. The guy was VP of Engineering, he had an innate understanding of redundancy, of back-ups, he would have known that if he had to drop the Halvarez persona he needed to have another established account to jump to, that simply creating a new account would have been too obvious.
Again, is there any reason why he would have used only one? What would you have done? I know that I would have mixed it up a bit and used at least a dozen different accounts.
If it can be shown that the interference went deeper than they're saying, that has huge implications, not least because, as it currently stands, a lot of the shilled auctions will not be getting any refund because Halvarez was not the penultimate bidder.
So, we need to look very carefully at all our auctions, especially over the past few months, and work out if any other active accounts suddenly went quiet at around the same time as Halvarez. If it can be shown that he was operating a number of shill accounts, a lot more of us will get the refund we deserve.
