Protect Your Domain Names From Fraudsters

By Michel Maling

If you profit online from home and have websites, the chances are that you will have registered a couple of domain names. This makes you the perfect target for fraudsters, and there are two different domain name scams that I have been made aware of recently.

The first is what is known as a fake domain renewal letter. The scam involves the fraudster trawling the who is records, which is a publicly available online database of domain names and their owners addresses. Next they will send out order forms that look like invoices to the owners of these domain names and remind them that they need to renew their domain names to avoid losing them. The letters look as though your actual registrar has sent them to you and they usually offer you a transfer service. If you send payment to these companies then your domain name will be transferred to them and add another year to your contract. These fraudsters will normally charge more than what you would pay on your own registrar to renew and this should seem strange to most.

Once you transfer your domain name out to this type of company, you may find it difficult to get it back to your original registrar. Also if you had any hosting services with your previous registrar you will probably lose those too. The safest thing to do with any letters that you do get in this regard is shred them. You can also check this out with your registrar, but there will be no benefits if you do change registrars.

The second scam that is going around is a letter you will get with somebody offering to buy your domain name. The fraudster will then indicate that you must pay for a professional appraisal service so that he can make sure that he is buying value. He will usually only be willing to pay 65% of the appraisal price and offers you three different appraisal companies for you to choose from. You will obviously choose the cheaper option, and this will be where the scam comes in. The cheaper company will be owned by the fraudster, and once you pay for the appraisal, you will never hear from him again.

Protect you domains from fraudsters by making sure that you keep records of all the domains that you own and information such as date of purchase, the registrar and the expiry date. Also remember to keep track of your passwords. It is better to consolidate all your domain names to one registrar, then it is easy to tell if you receive scam mail from another company. If somebody does offer to buy your domain, then it is their responsibility to do their research on the value.