What these people do might not be technically illegal, but it’s certainly not ethical either. Say you buy a domain name for your business. Some time later you get a very official looking letter in the mail asking you to renew your domain name with DROA because it’s about to expire. They are counting on you not remembering what company you originally bought the domain from because it most likely wasn’t with DROA. Now say you renew with them. What you actually do is transfer your domain to their service, where you’ll now pay more for less features and bad customer service.

These guys gave us a great laugh here in the office. A lady called up saying she was from 411business.us and wanted to know if we wanted to renew our listing on that site. After much haggling, we finally got the price out of her: almost $500 for two years. She must have thought we don’t have an accountant because one quick look proved we’d never done business with them before. Ever.

This scam is on my mind right now because I’ve gotten seven letters in the last few weeks urging me to renew my car warranty, and a friend received a phone call devoted to the same.  All they ask is for you to call and give your credit card and personal information and your warranty will be extended.

Problems:

1. The letters and calls don’t come from your dealer.
2. Your dealer probably doesn’t even have the option to extend anyway.
3. You’re about to get taken for some potentially serious cash for nothing.

This is a general entry because they come from so many places. I won’t go into too much detail because what you really need to know is that you should never click on a link to any account you may or may not own that comes to you in an email AND you should never call a customer service number sent to you in an email. These scammers are good at masking links to they look like they come from Capital One, or Ebay, or PayPal, or a hundred other places.