Domain Scammers
I am sitting here in the vast White Light Computing corporate office today working away on various tasks I have to get done. My cell phone rings with "unavailable". Normally I avoid the taking calls from "unavailable". But one of my clients does have caller id blocked on their phones and I thought maybe it was them. Wrong...
The individual on the other end of the line is Gary from Domain Registry Support. He was really glad to get in touch with me because there is some emergency information he needs to send me based on changes to my domain. He rattles off some verification information to certify who I am and to sound official. It smelled bad right from the beginning. He notes my fax number registered is incorrect on the domain information records. I ask him for the number and he hesitates and then spits out a number which was bogus. I tell him I never registered a fax number after he lies to me. What a bunch of baloney. He demands a fax number. It is an emergency. I tell him I don't use one (I hate fax machines... after all it is hardware {g}).
I tell him to mail me the information since he already confirmed my address. He refuses since this emergency change is happening in the next 24 hours and fax is the only technology available for instant communications. Guess he never heard of email. I get his name and number and note I will call him back after I confirm with my domain registration company that there is an emergency change coming down.
The folks at GoDaddy were great. They inform me of this scam going on where this company scares people into sending them money and not to do business with them, unless of course I want to move my domain over to the scammers. I know I have had snail mail in the past, which looks very official from domain scammers, but I do not recall getting a phone call.
So Chuck from GoDaddy offers me the "privacy option" for my domain. This is an add on to my domain registration. I am in the camp of I should never have to opt into privacy, but after scam I decided to purchase the protection. Dumb, but safer.
After hanging up it hits me. What if Domain Registry Support was just a little company hidden in some corner of the world where they cannot be touched by mainstream officials? What if this company was funded by domain registrars to get people scared into opting into this privacy add on? Could it be that I have just been scammed by a double agent? Maybe watching ABC's Alias has me thinking nothing is safe {g}.
I thought passing along this story might help others who might get scammed by these evil doers.
6 Comments:
Just had a similar experience today while I was working at home prior to heading to a dentist appointment. The bad news for these guys is that I am on the do not call list and I intend to go after them for violating the policy.
Thanks for your site. I just got a call from these guys and googled them while I was on the phone. After reading a few lines of this page I said good-bye and hung up.
I think your concerns about who is really behind this company are valid. And really, Domain registration should be private anyway. If a registration commpany is going to profit from your info, you should at least be given a piece of it for your trouble.
They called me with a similar story (urgent issues with my main domain name, etc.) and demanded my FAX number, which I had just changed to get away from the FAX spammers. So, this seems to be their M.O.
Domain Registry of America is one of the worst scam artist. I have over 400 clients and they call me about receiving an invoice from this company most often, trying to lure them into unwittingly transfer their domain to this company. Do not register with Domain Registry of America, they are unethical!
I run a company. While I was on vacation last week, a manager called me on my cell to inform me that these folks were calling, sounding very serious and talking about some emergency with one of our domains. The female caller (who sounded like she was from India) was very pushy, according to the manager. Two days later they faxed us an "URGENT NOTICE OF DOMAIN EXTENSION" and assigned us an account number supposedly regarding "INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY NOTIFICATION PROCESS" on a domain we had never previously registered but which had our company name in it (it was a .us domain and not our already-registered .com domain). We have almost 900 (nine hundred) domains registered, and this situation was a first for us! These folks have a lot of nerve. Anyway, I went ahead and registered the .us domain, along with the .net, .biz and .info domains for my company with our current registrar and ignored these "Domain Registry Support" losers/scammers.
I see that most of these posts are two years old, but I appreciate the information since I was just called by the same company. The woman on the phone asked for my fax number. I asked her to e-mail the information to me instead, noting that she should already have my e-mail on file if she was connected with my domain registry. She said their servers were down and couldn't e-mail and that they'd need to send me a fax because it was a 24-hour emergency.
I said, "If it's an emergency, please read me the fax." She said she couldn't do that but to call someone in customer service at 1-800-591-7398. I asked her the name of her company, Google'd it, saw it was a scam and was thankful I gave out no information.
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