[viraptor]

Doesn't match my experience. I used them to check the price of A...B...C...D....com.au which was available. A few days later, I came back to register it, just to find that that domain, ABC...D...com.au and ABCD.com.au are reserved and available via auction. Checking with national registrar directly I confirmed the domain is not reserved. With that information I contacted the namecheap support who gave me some direct "add to cart" url which was not normally available.

I don't trust any registrar anymore.

[dkonofalski]

I think you're projecting some ill intent here on the part of NameCheap that may be unwarranted. It's quite possible that someone had purchased the domain but it failed for whatever reason or that the cached version of the whois database that NameCheap was using was outdated. I've tried to register a name from the .AZ (Azerbaijan) registry through multiple sites and was able to successfully place an order only to be refunded because the information in the registry was cached and almost 4 months out of date. Additionally, some registrars are not actually able to register certain TLDs and so they use a proxy service to facilitate the transaction. It's possible that NameCheap isn't even a .com.au registrar and was simply passing along a result from whoever they partner with to fulfill those requests.

I'm not disputing that what happened to you happened the way you describe it but I am disputing that NameCheap did anything nefarious in order for the situation to play out exactly as you've described.