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.
