Google Reveals Its Playful Reward for Guy Who Briefly Owned Google.com

Last fall, Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) former employee, Sanmay Ved, found the most used domain name available, and successfully bought it for $12.

The money and the story soon died down, but now, thanks to the company’s post titled “Google Security Rewards – 2015 Year in Review”, we finally find out.

He told CNNMoney he made the purchase simply out of curiosity.

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. It ended up paying twice that amount to a charity he picked.

Ved said he didn’t know what caused Google to lose control of the domain ever so briefly. You see, Google had initially chose to award Ved with the sum of $6006.13.

Google (GOOGL, Tech30) admits Ved owned the domain, albeit very temporarily. Turns out it was true because according to Google, they have revealed the amount that they have given to Ved which was in the tune of $6,006.13 (which is Google’s geeky way of spelling “google”, just in case it wasn’t obvious). The group runs free schools in parts of that country where poverty and child labor are widespread.

Google also revealed that it gave away over $2 million in rewards throughout 2015 to members of the public who found and reported significant bugs through their Secuity Reward Programme. It said the largest single award it paid past year was $37,500 to an Android security researcher.