The College Fix

You can’t learn this in a classroom – it’s too practical.

When Babson College MBA student Sanmay Ved saw Google.com on a list of domains for sale in September – from Google’s own domain search page – he bought it for $12, “never really expecting the transaction to go through,” CNNMoney reports today.

The former Google employee recounted his luck “for a minute or so” on his LinkedIn page (with screenshots):

Additionally, my Google Search Console (aka Google Webmaster Tools) was auto-updated with webmaster related messages for the Google.com domain which actually means ownership was transferred to me! One gets the below messages in Search Console only for those domains for which one is the verified admin/verified owner …

Then Google screwed him.

Though purchase had successfully gone through, and domain now belonged to me as evident above, the purchase was followed by an order cancellation email from Google Domains. Google could do this given the registration service used by me (aka Google Domains) belonged to Google …

But since Ved’s purchase revealed an embarrassing security flaw in Google, they offered him $6,006.13 (the numerical transliteration of Google’s letters) as a reward – and doubled it when Ved said he’d donate it to an Indian charity, CNNMoney reported.

Any company should snap up Ved as quickly as he snapped up the most valuable domain on earth.

Read the story and Ved’s post.

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