Small Business Domain Name Scam
0 commentsI was the attempted victim of an interesting domain name scam at work last week. An international caller told me that he worked in the Security division of a London-based domain name registrar. They had received a domain registration for several variants of our company name. The purported registrant was from somewhere in Georgia - possibly a competitor!
Was this a competitor of ours, and would we be harmed if he registered these domain names? I played along and said yes, it would harm us, and please do not release these domain names to the fraud. Immediately the caller confirmed that this was probably a competitor who was trying to capitalize on our company name. The supposed registrant had already paid to register six domain names for ten years at the price of $1200 (about a $700 premium). If my company wanted to stop the infringement, all we had to do was give our credit card information and we could buy him out of these domain names.
I could see how this would be a rather convincing scam to the average small business owner. The caller tricked a senior-level person at our office into believing that it was a real marketing threat. I should have gotten the company name of the registrar so that we could file a report (or at least bad-mouth him here on my blog).
Two years ago on my blog, I talked about how inexpensive domain name registrations made GoDaddy successful. Read the article here.