Search engine registration scam

Do you remember the letters you used to get from Domain Registry of America trying to get you into paying over-prices for domain transfers? Now there’s a new trick going on. Or at least I’ve never got one before.

It’s an email sent to the email address you’ve listed as whois email address when you registered your domain name and it’s asking you to pay for search engine registration. As usual with this kind of scams you get two options:

• Pay and stay in the search engines or
• Don’t pay and get removed in search engines after a specific date.

This is of course a big scam since your domain name will still be listed in the important search engines like Yahoo!, Google, and Bing even if you don’t pay. If you still want to pay for search engine inclusion it’s so much better to actually go directly to the big search engines and use their PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ad program.

This scam is asking for $75 for one domain name for one year(!!!). This is what this scam looks like (I’ve removed all links and invoice number/addresses etc):

Attn
This letter is to inform you that it’s time to send in your search engine registration for PHPBUILD.COM. Failure to complete your search engine registration by Jan 11, 2011 may result in the cancellation of this offer (making it difficult for your customers to locate you using search engines on the web). Your registration includes search engine submission for PHPBUILD.COM for 1 year. You are under no obligation to pay the amount stated above unless you accept this offer by Jan 11, 2011. This notice is not an invoice. It is a courtesy reminder to register PHPBUILD.COM for search engine listing so that your customers can locate you on the web.

This Offer for PHPBUILD.COM will expire on Jan 11, 2011. Act today!

And of course there’s a link to a site where you can pay using credit card, so it’s easy for you to get repped off 😉

Our customers will of course still be able to find us even after the 11th of January even if we don’t pay this fee, and one funny thing is that they don’t mention anywhere which search engine you will be excluded from….. Perhaps because it’s no search engine at all or perhaps because it’s a really small one that nobody is using just setup for this scam.

Another interesting thing is that they say in the email that it’s not an invoice, however in the email (at the top) they mention the word invoice and after that they give you a number that look like an invoice number 😕

The domain name used as the sender is domainregistrationsservices.com which isn’t even registered….

So, don’t fall for this and pay these huge amounts for nothing, instead use the $75 to get some PPC advertising at one of the big search engines like Yahoo, Google or Bing. Also setup a special email address you use only for the whois records of your domain names, that way you can easily see if the email is legit or spam.

If you want your whois records to remain completely anonymous you can trasfer your domain names to eXavier.com and get whois privacy for only $1.95 per year. If you register or transfer more than 5 domain names you get the private registration for free for your domain names! It will protect you from these kind of scams and you don’t have to worry that anybody will send you any scams or bad offers (not via email or normal letters).