We’ve told you about domain renewal scams before and would like to bring a similar one to your attention. Once again we’ve chosen to call this a scam even though it is technically a legit, yet deceiving, business practice.
This letter was forwarded on to us from one of our customers who own a .com.au domain. The way the scam operates is through a document sent in the mail that looks like an invoice for your domain. In reality it’s asking you to register a slight variation of your domain name at a heavily inflated price. As you can see on the letter the stated domain is a .com where the recipient owns a .com.au domain.
Because these letters look like an invoice a lot of people are paying them, no questions asked, especially with the prospect of receiving a free gift (a portable DVD player in this case) for paying before a certain date. As we said, technically this is a legal operation – notice the ‘this is an invitation to register’ in small text – but it’s extremely misleading and unethical and we don’t want people to be taken advantage of!
What to do if you get one of these letters? Throw it in the bin. Or if it’s from a different letter, please let us know about it so that we can bring it to the attention of our readers.
