Posts Tagged ‘domain name’

Domain Renewal Group – Scam warning

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

A couple of our clients have recently received official looking letters from an organisation calling itself Domain Renewal Group.  The letters purport to be a Domain Name Expiration Notice and relate to a domain that the client really does own.  They offer the client the opportunity to transfer the registration to themselves and renew their domain registration at an inflated price.

Domain Renewal Group - Domain Expiration Notice

Domain Renewal Group - Domain Expiration Notice

Domain Renewal Group have been around for a little while now, a quick search finds their name mentioned quite frequently, usually in conjunction with the keyword scam.  There is a good little site which lists known domain name scams operating in the UK and Domain Renewal Group feature there.

It appears from various reports that Domain Renewal Group don’t actually transfer your domain name or renew it, they just take your money and do nothing.  I’m not sure if this is better or worse than actually transferring your registration to a bunch of pirates.

We always register domains in the client’s name so that they actually own their domain names and can transfer them away from us if they want to.  With personal registrations you can hide the owner’s details on the Whois database but with businesses this isn’t allowed.

Domain Renewal Group must get their information from Whois, then they send a letter to the owner asking them to pay for renewal of their domain.  This is quite cunning as proper registrars normally communicate via email rather than letter, by sending a letter Domain Renewal Group can avoid the person who normally deals with domain renewals (and who would recognise the notice as a scam) and go directly to the business which owns the domain name.  The owner will recognise the domain name and just pay the invoice, the amounts involved are small enough not to raise suspicion.

If you receive a letter like this from Domain Renewal Group or from anyone else contact your own registrar or the person who maintains your website before parting with any money.