Google Domain Sold For $12 by accident

Google Domain sold for $12 by accident. It’s a perfect example of how easy it is to make an error when the stakes are high and mistakes can be costly. In this case, the domain was worth 12 times more than what was paid for it!. A former employee of Google, Sanmay Ved found that a domain of Google was available for sale on September 29, 2015. And he bought it for $12. He owned it for about a minute and was rewarded by Google for pointing this error. He said that he never expected this transaction to go through.

He posted on his LinkedIn, “I was hoping I would get an error at some point saying the transaction did not go through, but I was able to complete the purchase, and my credit card was actually charged!”.

On CNN Money, he stated that he purchased the domain simply out of curiosity and also added that he thought at some point of time it would block him out, but he was curious to see how far it would go.

Google domain sold and what did he do next?

Finally, the purchase worked for about a minute, in that minute he tried to change the Google home page, but it didn’t work. Later he received an e-mail from Google about the cancellation of his purchase.  

Sanmay Ved worked in Google for more than 5 years. According to his LinkedIn profile, he is an MBA grad from Babson College in suburban Boston. Google admitted that he owned the domain for about one minute and paid him $6006.13, which is the numeric version of the word “Google”. CNNMoney on its blog post titled this incident as “Squint a little and you’ll see it,” this post. 

When Google found out that Sanmay Ved is going to donate that reward to a charity, Google doubled the reward. He instructed Google to give that reward amount to the  Art of Living India Foundation. This foundation organizes free education in rural parts of India.

Google always rewards people who find legit bugs or breach in the company’s website or any of its products and inform them. Kamil Hismatullin of Kazakhstan received its highest reward, $37,500 to an Android security researcher’s highest reward was $37,500 to an Android security researcher.