Archive for the ‘Offline Scams’ Category

Beware of this sleazy try-on from Domain Services

Our old “friends” Domain Services are at it again (still?). After years of suckering inexperienced and unwary domain name owners into paying up to 30-times more for domain name renewals than they need to, regulators finally applied the proverbial “blowtorch to the belly” with these sleazebags.

But, true to form (they couldn’t lie straight in bed!), they come up with another swerve on their traditional scam which was to:

• Create an official-looking form that most people assumed was an invoice for domain name registration. (It wasn’t when you read the fine print.)
• Suckers paid the exhorbitant over-charges, only to discover that their domain names were now transferred to another registrar not of their choosing (because Domain Services and their related entities were NEVER domain registrars… they just performed a service — and in some cases, pseudo-registrars like Domain Services registered the domains in their own names, meaning the original owners no longer had control over their own domain names).

This latest sucker-bait from Domain Services is to send you a similar, official-looking non-invoice (that looks just like a real one) that’s equally misleading unless you read the fine print carefully.

What it really is is a solicitation for them to submit your domain name to search engines — a totally unnecessary task these days, when search engine spiders and crawlers will usually index your new site within days of launch (in some cases, within hours) automatically.

Take a look at the form we received this morning for one of our domains… and if you receive one, by either email or snail mail, trash it.

Over 90 fraudulent scams hit by FTC and US State Attorneys-General

From Rod Cook at MLMwatchdog.com

22 Mar 2011 — Hard hits on empty promises.  Fines in the millions of dollars are common and jail time for some phony “work at home get a job” scammers.  The number and variety of these scams are amazing in the amount of money that they brought in.  Talk about illegal income claims!  Hits of $20,000 on consumers are not uncommon in the report below.

http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2011/03/emptypromises.shtm
   

This chain letter scam has been around for a while now. One of the distinguishing features is the claim that it’s somehow endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, or was featured on the Oprah show.

Yeah, right… to denounce it as a scam!

Here’s a recent (2010) copy of the usual PayPal $6 email sent to prospective suckers (and, further down the page, transcripts from a successful court case by the FTC for an identical scam that should make alarming reading for anyone kidding themselves that this scam is legal and ethical, etc):

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