Business owners beware! There is a new scam growing in popularity based around your website’s domain name. If you are a business owner with a website or are someone who owns website, read on to inoculate yourself from falling into the trap.
It works like this:
All domain name registration information is freely available to the public – including the name, address, and business name of who owns the domain name. All you need to know is where to look. Take this website for example http://whois.domaintools.com/. If you plug in your website’s domain name (www.website.com) it will spit out all available registration information.
Some scammers have gotten wind of this and are using that information to send fake renewal invoices to the owners of the domain name. Below is a couple of examples that clients of ours have received.
While these looks legitimate, under further inspection our clients actually had no relationships with either of these “companies”. And these are just a couple example, there are a number of fake domain name companies we’ve run into over the past few years. Unfortunately most business owners won’t know the difference since interactions with your website domain name company is likely very sparse.
So next time you get a bill in the mail to renew your domain name or website hosting don’t assume it’s legitimate. What you can do is actually use the same website linked above (http://whois.domaintools.com/) and check the “registrar” information that comes back. If it doesn’t make the name on the invoice it’s most likely a scam!
(Also if you’re looking for someone to manage your website, give us an email at [email protected]!)
Featured photo from artofc.blogspot.com used through Creative Commons Licence 2.0
