| Yeah, that may have been done at one time, several years ago. But that's been pretty much stopped at this point.
Not really, it happened to me two weeks back. The domain I searched for on GoDaddy was not available after 2 hours and when I did a who is look up it was registered by Synergy Wholesale Pty Ltd another registrar.
My suspect is that there could be some triggers that would go off based on the domain name you search and other parameters and then if its something they are interested in then it could probably automatically register it or send it to another registrar for registration via an api or something.