Domain Services Renewal and Search Engine Submission Service Scam #TBT

For this week's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to the topic of domain name scams. Unfortunately, this throwback doesn't go back too far since I last wrote about this in June 2015, when I reported the exploits of iDNS and their Domain Name Expiration Notices.

A new scam came through my inbox this week that business owners should be aware of. I deem this one as aggressive because I received several identical emails for many domain names that I manage for clients. Take a look at this email, and then I'll explain what's happening here...



This particular scam is designed to create panic so they can get your money quickly. This email arrived in my inbox early morning on March 1, 2016. The notice itself says the deadline date is March 1, 2016 and that date is mentioned 6 times in the notice. The idea here is that they make you panic that your domain name will expire the day of the notice, and they are hoping you will act without reading the fine print at the bottom.

That fine print says "There is no pre-existing relationship between DS and the domain mentioned above." Furthermore this scam is formatted to look like a domain name renewal, when in fact it's a solicitation to add your domain name into search engines. Read this carefully: "This notice is not in any part associated with a continuation of services for domain registration. Search engine submission is an optional service that you can use as a part of your website optimization and alone may not increase the traffic to your site."

Just to be clear, the alleged service they are selling, assuming they do anything at all, is to visit the URL Submission pages on search engines to submit your domain name. These are the submit pages for Google and Bing, but others exist too:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url

As I said, their offer of 1, 2, 5, and 10 years of service makes it look like a domain name registration renewal, when in fact their alleged offer is to submit your domain name to the search engines every year.

Repeat Offender

While researching this scam, I found a few scam reports that dated back to November 2009! Several of the reports since 2014 looked identical to the email I'm showing above, including this same business address: "DS 3501 Jack Northrop Ave. Suite #F9238 Hawthorne, CA 90250 USA".

The tactic they are using is quite old. They are scraping through the public domain name registrations to acquire the names, addresses, and emails of domain name registrants. These emails are unsolicited and certainly fall into the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 because they do not clearly indicate that they are an ad.

This tactic gave rise to the need for private domain name registration. For an extra fee, you can have your registrar obfuscate your personal information to prevent these scams from ever reaching you. My own company provides that private registration service, which is why I received several of these emails all at once the other day.

It won't be long before the email address notice@domainnotices684.com and the domain domainnotices684.com are tagged by firewalls and anti-scam software, but that won't stop these guys. They will simply register another domain name tomorrow. In fact, the domainnotices684.com was registered on February 8, 2016. I've listed their domain name registration information below, as you can see they also use a private registration service called "WHOISGuard Protected" to hide their own identity.

Protecting Yourself

I doubt that domain name scams will ever stop, and they are all designed to trick you into thinking you overlooked the renewal of your domain name. It's pretty difficult to overlook the legitimate renewal notices from your real registrar, especially since they usually send them 90 days before expiration, 60 days, 30 days, and then 5 days before the domain name it to expire.

As long as your personal information is listed on the domain name public records, you will continue to receive scams like this. You could hide your information by paying for the extra privacy service, or you could use an alternate email. To protect yourself from email scams, you could set up a special email with Yahoo or Gmail and use that in your registrar account. Just make sure you check it at least once every 3 months, otherwise you might miss those legitimate renewal notices.

The bottom line is that you should never blindly pay bills you don't immediately recognize, even when it comes to website and domain name bills. Whenever you have doubt, just ask your webmaster to review them for you first.