Yesterday I got a letter sent to me about one of the .com domain names I owned, I got it from Vidahost last June or July (by the way Vidahost are one of the BEST hosting companies out there!). I’d only paid for it for a year as they were doing a 99p deal on .com’s. So the fact this letter wasn’t actually from Vidahost, but a company called ‘Domain Renewal Group’ instantly made me wonder what it was about. They were asking me to send them £25 to renew the domain for another year, £40 for two years or £90 for five years, there was a slip at the bottom for me to send them back my credit card details ready to renew with them.
It does mention that this isn’t a bill, and that by paying them, you’d have to switch your name servers / DNS to them etc. So there are some strands of truth within it, but to the untrained, and quick reading eye, it does look like a bill for domain renewal – it just feels slightly ‘scammy’ to me. I imagine they just go through all the domain names with contact details and get in touch around renewal time to try and get people to give them money for their services.
Any way, have a little look at the letter..
Scam, or no scam – what do you think? Google suggests they are shady scammers..
Scam. The only company that can charge you for anything to do with your domain is the company you registered it with. We get quite a few of these in the post. I think they seem more believable than an email because they’re on paper!
It’s pretty simple, once you have hosting set up at Vidahost they have something called ‘Softcaclous’ which allows you to install all manny of things to your webspace, in just a few clicks you can have a copy of WordPress installed, and then importing blogger posts over to WordPress is pretty simple, there are lots of guides online to do it. I do love WordPress, you can have such a fabulous looking blog in no time! 🙂
Scam. My clients are getting a few of these letters here in Australia. It’s disgraceful and an appalling deception. The letters look very formal. Best to let your clients know and notify *insert small trades department* in your location.
My reply is 4 years late but I got exactly the same text in email form and it came from email address domains@listingdomsearch.com . t came 2 days after I changed my domain name from .com to .org