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ALERT: Domain Name Scam
By Dale Walls
As a business owner with an Internet presence, your domain name may be a targeted opportunity to steal it from your control. A firm that operates as Domain Registry of American (DROA) has your Internet domain name in its sights to con you into inadvertently transferring your domain name into their grasps.
First off, the company is based out of Canada so it’s not really ‘of America’ as is claims. What they aim to do is spam you, not via e-mail, but by your standard postal mailing address used to register your domain name when it was first established. This information can be found in your Registrant data populated on an Internet WHOIS (pronounced as two words, “Who Is”) database. You can test yours by going to www.dnsstuff.com and entering your domain name in the WHOIS lookup field. As you may find in a lookup of your own domain, information such as Company Name, Address, Point of Contact, Phone Number, and sometimes even Email address information is displayed.
Domain Registry of America uses available WHOIS data to send a mailer disguised as a domain name renewal notice to your place of business as listed. The mailer conveniently outlines that your domain name is coming up for renewal, even though some cases have the mailer as early as 4 to 5 months ahead of the scheduled expiration date. Their reason for such an early notice? To beat your current domain registrar to the punch.
The mailer looks to be a legitimate renewal notice outlining pricing options, other domain name availabilities that may be of interest, and maintains your current information as listed in WHOIS making it look to be from a company maintaining an account with information respective of your organization. Although seemingly just another administrative chore to be taken care of for maintaining another year’s worth of domain name registration, by filling out and returning the form with payment you’re inadvertently transferring your domain name to the face-less Canadian organization that plans to make it very difficult for you to recoup on your mistake. The problem here is that the rates are sometimes in effect three times the standard costs of domain renewal.
Be aware of this scam and look out for such mailers. Additionally you can protect yourself by knowing who your domain registrar really is and opting for the right to privacy in your WHOIS listing. WHOIS privacy will sometimes cost you a few extra dollars in addition to your renewal but has the potential to eliminate much headache from Spammers and Junk mail senders.
Although frustrating, this is nothing new and the FTC and US Postal Inspection Service requests that if you get such a notification from DROA that you report it on their respective web sites www.ftc.gov and www.usps.com in the continued legal effort to thwart these fraudulent attempts to take control of your domain name.
Have a company abroad? Look out for the Domain Registry of Canada, Domain Registry of Europe, and Domain Registry of Australia; all of which are the same operation.
Dale Walls is President of Corsica Technologies, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner & Small Business providing complete IT Solutions for businesses, government, and home computing in Maryland, DC, and Virginia. Feel free to contact Dale at 443.262.9290, or by email at dale@corsicatech.com.
