Sneaky buggers!

[Fingers]

So I got this official looking letter telling me that one of our domain names is expiring and needs to be renewed. The letter looks somewhat like something I'd get from the Canadian government. Two things tipped me off that this letter wasn't on the up and up.

First, the domain is a .com, not a .ca. Sure, there are residency rules for our .ca domain addresses but clearly this one doesn't qualify. The other 'clue' is that they wanted $40 a year to register the domain! You kidding me?

Of course this rang all sorts of bells and I thoroughly examined the letter. There was some fine print that said the letter was NOT a bill and by signing it I was allowing the sender to register the domain on my behalf. For $40 a year.

You know, if those greedy bastards had of billed me for under $10, I might have fallen for it and transferred over to them. I can see how less savvy people might fall for that crap though.

I'd really like to know how these people knew that I owned the name. I mean, for this to work they'd have to cross reference my Canadian address with my .com domain. Is this readily available or do they just look for expiring domains and send a letter from the appropriate nationality?

So, clever or underhanded? Would you do it if you could get away with it?

 

[Arneba28]

they might of used www.whois.sc you can get everything, the ip address the reg owner, the leasing company on the name...everything!!

 

[Fingers]

they might of used www.whois.sc you can get everything, the ip address the reg owner, the leasing company on the name...everything!!

Yeah, but that would be pretty labour intensive. I'm thinking they have a way of knowing what names are about to expire and which ones belong to which country. I can't see them picking a name one at a time and sending one of those letters. You can't make any money that way.

 

[Jesse17]

I have two domains registered, and every year, just before they expire, I get a letter saying "Your domain name is expiring, renew it now." None of these letters are from the company that I bought the domain names through, because they automaticly renuew on my credit card, and don't send my juck mail.

I was pissed the first couple times I got these misleading letters, but have gotten use to tossing them in the trash.

As far as who.is, they don't list all domain names, just the ones listed with them. I've been trying to find out who owns 17ranch.com for more than a year now, and haven't been sucsessful. Who.is just says it's not registered with them.

 

[Fingers]

I have two domains registered, and every year, just before they expire, I get a letter saying "Your domain name is expiring, renew it now."

So this is fairly prevalent. I seem to recall having gotten something like this in the distant past but I'm not sure. This particular domain wasn't one I wanted to keep anyway.

I've also heard about people keeping an eye on domain name searches somehow. If you do a search to see if a name is available, they buy it and then you have to pay them to get it. This worries me somewhat because I've chosen a name for my home brewery and searched it already to see if it's available. In order to defend against this a little, I searched several different combinations like xxxbrewing, xxxbrewery, etc.

 

[capcrnch]

Funny, I just got something this week about that and thought it was weird as hell..

Scam-a-rooni.

 

[david_42]

For me it is very simple. All of my domain names are on automatic renewals, so I get an email from GoDaddy about a month ahead of time. I'll check the first one to be certain the credit card info is good on all of them and then not worry.

I also have two similar domains that I don't use, but might in the future.

I guess the trollers can see the domains are on autopilot and don't bother me.

 

[Funkenjaeger]

Yeah, but that would be pretty labour intensive. I'm thinking they have a way of knowing what names are about to expire and which ones belong to which country. I can't see them picking a name one at a time and sending one of those letters. You can't make any money that way.

Not really... the WHOIS info contains the registrant's address and such, and also contains the date of registration and date of expiration and other info... It doesn't seem like it'd be a tricky matter to write a program to crawl various sites and do a WHOIS lookup on each one, extracting the date and contact info, and then generate mailings to be sent out at the appropriate time of year, I don't really see why they would need a human to sit there and do that.