I received a batch of letters in the post the other day which contained notices reminding me to renew my domain names.
A very useful service to be sure. The problem? The letters weren’t from the company where I bought my domains.
As a courtesy to domain name holders we are sending you this notification of the domain name registration that is due to expire in the next few months. When you switch today to the domain registry of America you can take advantage of our best savings.
Your registration for [my domain name here] will expire on March 6th 2008. Act today!
They do point out in fairness that
This is not a bill, it is rather an easy means of payment should you decide to switch your domain name registration to the domain registry of America.
I get my domains from namecheap.com where they cost $9.29 per year.
I haven’t seen prices as expensive as domain registry of America since the old network solutions days
1 year €26.00
2 years €43.00 (Best value)
While they don’t make any outright lies in their letter, it is definitely misleading .They even provide a form for your credit card details and an envelope for returning it.
Keep an eye out for these kind of mail phishing type scams and always check details before signing up or paying for anything.
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don’t talk about these bastards! i own about 30+ domains, the majority of them with public whois, which is how i suspect these guys get your postal and domain info…
for the past few months i’ve been using name.com for domains; $6 .com’s with free private whois protection
That’s funny cause I just got one of those in the mail yesterday so they post all the way to Australia (hope it costs them heaps
).
Ive got them a couple of times and they have always just gone straight to the bin.
I remember getting one of these in the post ages ago it really freaked me out, as I get really intimidated by these things, and I owned an anti-corrupt government domain and thought “oh shit they’re on to me” lmao! But yeah who would be gulliable to pay E26 a year for them, I get mine domains off Go Daddy for 10 dollars!
Nice blog by the way, first time viewer and writer.
I’d love to know what kind of response they get to these letters.
It’s got to cost them a fair bit of cash to send them ( they sent me around 10 separate letters rather than one letter for all my domains – from the US )
But their profit on a single signup could be $30+ per year.
I reckon there are lots of people who had a domain name bought on their behalf by a web design firm who would assume that this was legit.
A lot of web design firms probably overcharged them when they registered as well.
Gu3rr1lla: Thanks for the comments
No problem scoby
Was just crawling the blogosphere, found your blog through Smemons site, he got me into blogging although I don’t have a site yet still trying to think of a good domain name lol!
May I ask, was it difficult for you to acquire a dot IE domain and how did you go about doing it because I know that you need to have proof & drafts etc of a site before they give you permission to own it.
http://scoby.ie/registering-a-dot-ie-irish-domain-name
I thought this was worth a post, hope this helps Gu3rr1lla
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