Be Alert for Domain Scams
Two of our clients have come to us within the past few days to ask about bills they got in the mail that looked like invoices for domain name registration renewals. They came from Domain Listing Service, and close inspection shows they are for “Annual Website Search Engine Listing” at a cost of $75.
What they’re offering is to allow you to reserve another version of your domain to prevent some other company from taking that domain and causing confusion among your customers. If you think that might be a problem, go ahead and register other domains — with .net, .org, .us, .biz, .tv, or whatever other top-level domain extensions you want.
The typical cost is $25/year apiece, but if you call the toll-free number on this fax, they’ll try to sell it to you for a 10-year term or a 5-year term. If you ask for the 1-year rate, they quote $35.
[Update: as of 2022, the cost of this is about $150. But it’s not worth a penny more than it was in 2007. Which is nothing.]I plan to toss all of these right into the circular file.
