Originally posted by wohl 
They've been around for ages, used to use network solutions to register hundreds of names the day after they dropped. They'd hold them to see if anyone (especially the previous owner) would inquire, but wouldn't pay under the old invoice system and after 60 days or whatever the domains would be deleted again. 
But once people like domaindeluxe arrived there were slim pickings left over by the next day, and eventually they worked out that a new strategy was required.
Ah brings back some memories of the days when you really could get very solid domains hours after a drop had taken place. Was amazing to me what others were missing. I remember a drop on 2001-02-14 when I registered a couple $k worth of domains hours after a drop even though I had to go through the list at a painfully slow 50 domains per page on deleteddomains.com because I knew of nothing else and only searched on a small number of keywords.