If you own your own domain, and especially if you have someone on your team who pays bills, please take note and beware!
I’ve attached a photo of a letter that I get occasionally from a company call iDNS. The letter is trying to fool me into switching the domain registration for a particular domain on my account at my domain registrar Godaddy. If I paid the bill, not only would I have paid $45 for a domain registration that would normally cost $9 or so, but they would transfer the domain to iDNS as a registrar which is even worse. In other words, my new registrar would be a company that engages in fraud. That’s very bad! I looked up the Better Business Bureau listing for iDNS – they had an F, with 57 negative reviews, no positive reviews, and a number of complaints. The likelihood is that if I actually transferred the registration to them, I’d have a very hard time transferring it back to a reasonable registrar.
The other fun part about owning a domain is that, unless the domain is registered as a “private” domain, the email address as well as the postal address listed in the domain registration information will get spammed by all sorts of businesses wanting to do a website, or a mobile app, or logos – lots of stuff. The catch is that using the domain email to contact the domain owner for solicitation is a violation of agreement. So, the very fact that these companies violate their agreements and ignore the prohibition against spamming domain owners, says that the companies are not legitimate. As far as I’m concerned, when I get an email from them, they are blacklisted. I wouldn’t do business with them even if I needed their services. I don’t do business with businesses that ignore policies.
It is possible to “lock” a domain, in other words to prevent its “accidental” transfer to another registrar. This is a good idea. It may cause some delay if you really do want to transfer a domain to a different registrar, but it will probably also keep you from losing your domain to a slammer.
I mentioned a “private” registration. That means that registrant pays extra to have the contact information for the domain hidden. Anyone trying to contact the registrant has to go through an intermediary which is generally the domain registrar that holds the registration. I used to just change the email on the registration information regularly instead of paying extra for a private registration, but it’s gotten to the point that if I change the registration email, I will start getting spam to the new address within a day or two. It’s almost like the registrar is feeding the new information to the spammers that use it. I don’t think that’s actually the case though, I believe there are businesses that regularly scan the registration databases, update their records, and then farm those email lists out to spammers – especially indicating which records are new or newly changed. So, I’ve started registering any new domains as private domains, and I’m gradually migrating existing domains over to a private registration. I hate doing that, because it adds $8/year to the cost of a domain, at least with Godaddy. That just about doubles the cost of the domain. I currently own 28 domains, so converting them all to private would mean another $250 or so per year expense for the convenience of not having to delete all the spam solicitations sent to my registration email address.
If you own a domain, or if you have someone paying your bills, or if you pay bills for someone else, watch out for these scams! Don’t get slammed!
