As a owner of several websites, I regularly get misleading domain expiration notices from companies that are not my domain registrar.
Sometimes the notices are about domains that really are expiring soon. Today, I got a notice of expiration notice from a place called domainregisstra.com from verranhaddad@sellstones.com. While the email never stated the expiration of the domain, it implied one by stating a “due date” of May 13, 2011. The email text stated:
Attn :
This solicitation is to inform you that it’s time to send in your registration for [mywebsite.com]. DRS is a submission service and search engine ranking provider.
Failure to complete your search engine registration by May 13, 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 [mywebsite.com] for 1 year. You are under no obligation to pay the amount stated above unless you accept this offer by May 13, 2011. This notice is not an invoice. It is a courtesy reminder to register [mywebsite.com] for search engine listing so that your customers can locate you on the web.
So I looked up my domain at whois.com and found out the real expiration date of April 20, 2015.
The main scam here is that this looks like a renewal notice from my registar. But it’s from a company that wants to move me to a different registrar. If I was going to renew my domain, I’d just go to my real registar.
The price quoted from this email is $75 per year. That’s a scam considering that places like hover.com and godaddy offer domain registrations for $5 to $15 per year. The only claimed extra value is a “search engine submission”, which is really a worthless service. If your site is brand new and no search engine knows about it you can submit it to Google and submit it to Bing for free.