Beware of potential domain registrar scammers
UPDATE: Sören Nils Kuklau, in a tweet, pointed me to another person’s blog post about these people, which tells of a C&D letter they received from Domain Registry of America. Not sure what I’ll do if I get such a nastygram.
When you own your own domain name, you tend to get shit like this in the mail:
That’s actually the lowest third of a folded letter. So when you first take it out of the envelope, it looks like a bill. Only when you unfold it do you see that it’s not quite a bill:
I think that they intend for you to see the looks-like-a-bill part of it, conclude that it’s a bill, and pay it—and thereby switch your domain name registration over to them.
The back of the letter contains the “registration agreement”:
I didn’t bother to read all of that text (I have no intention of agreeing to it anyway), but I did notice this bit at the top:
This Registration Agreement (“Agreement”) sets forth the terms and conditions of your use of domain name registration and related services (“Services”). In this agreement “you” and “your” refer to you and the registrant listed in the WHOIS contact information for the domain name. “We”, “us” and “our” refer to eNom, Inc., Wild West Domains, Inc., BRANDON GRAY INTERNET SERVICES INC. (dba “NameJuice.com”), and DROA
Emphasis mine. So not only are these people trying to bullshit their way into being my registrar, but they’re not even a registrar—just a reseller for eNom, and two other companies I’ve never heard of.
By the way, the type in that agreement is really freaking small. I measured the capital A at the end of that first paragraph, and found that it’s exactly 1 mm tall.
So whenever you get anything in the mail about your domain name, read it VERY thoroughly. Especially don’t trust anything that doesn’t come from your registrar.
March 15th, 2008 at 22:26:11
Wild West Domains is the private label reseller company of Go Daddy.
March 17th, 2008 at 07:35:58
I even got one of those sent to Germany for a domain hosted in Germany. Needless to say that “Domain Registrars of America” did a good job of raising suspicion :)
March 25th, 2008 at 02:45:47
Yeah, everyone gets these, all the time. Well, everyone with a domain registered in the WHOIS, anyway.
The next one they send me is going straight to the Information Commissioner’s Office, as well as to the Office of Fair Trading.
Hopefully if everyone complains, someone will shut their operation down.