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Domain Name Scams

    The internet is a wonderful place and at the same time there are unscrupulous people trying to catch the unwary.

    In the mail I have received at various times a notification of my domain names due for renewal. The document looks authentic and appears to be a regular business invoice. I’m confident some of these end up in unsuspecting accounts departments and get paid. The only thing is that what these documents authorise is that you transfer your domain to them as your new registrar and you get to pay 100 times the going cost of renewing a domain!

    Another one I got today by email is reproduced here for all to be aware:

    From Tom Zu [tom.zu@pubip.org]

    Letter to the president or brand owner, thanks)

    Dear President,

    We are the department of Asian Domain Registration Service in china.I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on may 7, 2012 that a company which self-styled “WLDC Int’l Co. Ltd ” were applying to register ” mydomainname” as their Net Brand and some asia domain names through our firm.

    Now we are handling this registration, and after our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company’s, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. Out of the time limit we will unconditionally finish the registration for “WLDC Int’l Co. Ltd”.Looking forward to your prompt reply and have a nice day.

    Best Regards

    Tom Zu

    Registration Dept.

    Tel:+86-5515184482 || Fax:+86-551-5123308

    Address:No.1889 ShouChun Road,luyang District,Hefei,Anhui,China

    Firstly, this is not a new tactic. It’s been doing the rounds for a few years from what I can tell.

    And it is quite convincing – hey they even include a phone and fax number as well as an address. If you do your due diligence and look up the pubip.org website, it seems to be legit. A deeper search shows their domain whois details do not match those in the email and further in, one finds the domain is listed as a scam site. They seem to have a number of websites which are cloned as legit web businesses.

    BEWARE

    What will happen if you respond? They will attempt to sell you a bundle of associated domain names at highly inflated prices.

    Steer clear.

    If you really really want a bunch of hk,cn, or other domain names then go get them from a reputable domain name provider.

    We recommend Namecheap. They’ve been around a long time, are easy to deal with, and … are cheap. Namecheap.

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