Another Internet Scam

I received a couple of scam emails recently in regards to a couple of domains I own.

There are lots of organizations (I won’t give them the dignity of calling them “companies” because that makes them sound like legitimate businesses, which they’re not) who use domain WHOIS engines to harvest addresses and email addresses for the sole purpose of trying to get the domain holders to give them money under false pretenses.

For those unaware, it’s a requirement that domain registrants provide their contact information.  That information is available for every domain via a WHOIS query (although sometimes anonymized – my domains in question weren’t).

It’s been my experience that all of the organizations that use the WHOIS queries for solicitation purposes are scammers; intentionally misrepresenting themselves in order to get you to either unintentionally transfer your domain registration to them, or offering some other domain “service” at a greatly inflated price (sometimes stating in fine print that they’re actually trying to deceive you to try and avoid legal repercussions).

I’ve received those sort of solicitations via both snail mail and email, although the vast majority come via email.

The latest “offer” is so ridiculous and brazen that I wanted to share it.

Based on the header text it’s some sort of “Important” notification about my domain registration.

However, reading carefully shows that it’s actually a solicitation for a “search engine registration” (whatever that is) for $75 a year or $999 for a lifetime!

But don’t worry, you’re assured that “100% satisfaction guaranteed, you may request a refund within 30 days.”  (Yeah, right…)

And hurry, their offer expires soon!

They’ve even given you space on the form to give them the names of other domains and emails you own, along with your telephone number (sucker).

And I’m not sure what the statement “By accepting this offer, you agree not to hold DN liable for any part.” means, but it doesn’t sound very good to me.  What liability would there be in a search engine submission exactly?

The “offer” also states “once we receive your fax we will send you instructions on how to make a payment by credit card)” which surprised me a bit.  Normally the ripoff artists would grab a credit card number ASAP and make charges on it, unless this scam is that they ask for some alternate form of payment that can’t be later disputed (unlike a credit card).

(Maybe they’re trying to capture your phone number as well when you FAX them.)

A dead giveaway to the scammers is that they tend to use email addresses from one of the free email services (Google Gmail is the most popular of late) with an email address including lots of numbers (like globedomagbd77782@gmail.com).

Unfortunately these sorts of tactics likely work on a few naive suckers who aren’t paying attention, and the fact that they do work (if even only occasionally) is enough to make these sorts of schemes proliferate.

It’s all further evidence of why everyone should be concerned with the privacy of their online information.  If personal information is available online, there’s inevitably going to be someone who harvests it.

And it’s not that hard to do.  Recently someone mined information from Facebook and compiled all the data it gleaned together.

Mr. Bowes appears to have quite legally used a cleverly crafted web crawler code to gather details on over 100 million users who either intentionally or unintentionally failed to obscure their profiles from search engines.

The unfortunate reality is that the more personal information you have online, the more likely it is that someone tries to use that information for nefarious purposes.