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I was visiting eBay’s Pulse Page, a page that that shows the day’s trends and hottest searches, and I was surprised to see "yahoo.com" as the ninth most searched item of the day. What could people possibly be searching for with that phrase?

I decided to check it out and found a huge number of sellers offering free Yahoo e-mail addresses up for auction. The sellers would go to Yahoo and register free e-mail addresses with what they thought were desirable names, put them up for sale, and after their auctions would e-mail the winners the passwords to the free accounts. Most of the addresses offered up for auction were names related to the Xbox 360 or Sony PS3, and were marketed as "selling tools." And crazily, a few people seemed to be bidding on them.

Now I could see paying good money for a domain name if one wanted to sell such gaming systems, but an e-mail address? I just can’t see it being that important. It is amazing the things people come up with to try to make money, and even more amazing is the fact that people actually get drawn into their schemes. It is just another example of people trying prosper with anything remotely associated with the Xbox 360, the PS3, or any other "it" item.

Chris Leckness (3531 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

Chris Leckness is the Owner/Administrator of Mobilitysite. He is a Microsoft MVP, Mobile Devices and a member of the exclusive focus group, Mobius. Chris runs a Mobilitysite, GotZune, and a few other smaller sites and blogs. His personal blog is chris.leckness.com.