Guy Buys Google.com for $12

Sanmay Ved saw it was available late one night
By Neal Colgrass,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 12, 2015 5:00 PM CDT
Guy Buys Google.com for $12
   (Shutterstock)

A student in Massachusetts managed to buy the domain name Google.com and hold onto it—for roughly 60 seconds, the BBC reports. Sanmay Ved, an MBA student at Babson College, noticed the domain was available on Sept. 29 and bought it for all of $12. Suddenly he began receiving messages for Google's web administrators, but the company quickly noticed and undid the purchase. Google did give him a cash reward for spotting the mistake, and doubled it when he decided to give the money to a charity in India that provides education to children living in slums. The amount is "more than $10,000," Ved tells Business Insider.

"I don't care about the money, " he adds. "It was never about the money. I also want to set an example that it's people who want to find bugs that it's not always about the money." In his own telling of the odd transaction at LinkedIn, Ved explains that he once worked at Google and was searching for related domain names when he struck gold. "Maybe because I love Google to heart, and because I have always been a loyal Googler and Xoogler, reporting several vulnerabilities in the past which had gone unnoticed, some divine force decided to give me ownership for a minute or so," he recounts. (Meanwhile, Google just "bought the alphabet.")

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