In this domain name lesson video, I talk about a letter that one of my clients received in the mail requesting payment of a $228 fee for an “annual website domain listing on Internet directory” — a fee my client was confused about whether it needed to pay to maintain its domain name registration.
The important lesson is to understand what’s going on in this situation so anyone or any company that owns a domain name can readily know what’s a legitimate invoice for a domain name and what’s not.
First, to be clear: Domain name registrations are generally available for payment of an annual fee, which can be as little as $10 or so per year for .com at popular retail registrars, and most domain name registrars offer multi-year registrations. All trademark owners (all domain name registrants, for that matter) must pay this ongoing fee or risk having their domain name registration cancelled. In some cases, it’s possible to reclaim a lost domain name through the UDRP process, the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy — something I do for my clients — but it’s far less expensive and far less disruptive to simply pay the renewal fees on time.
In this case, the notice my client received was not for a domain name registration or renewal but only for listing on a discreet search engine that I suspect most people have never heard of or use. But the notice was confusing to my client, who thought it was a bill that needed to be paid.
Indeed, as I discuss in the video, more than 200 complaints have been filed with the Better Business Bureau just for the one company that sent a solicitation in the mail to my client, such as this:
This company sends out a solicitation that reads like a bill. They seem to be asking me to pay them so that I can keep my business domain name. This business is intentionally misleading and deceptive. They structure their letters to look like a bill from a legitimate business who hosts my domain name, but they do not and have not ever had hosting control over my domain name.
So, what’s the best way to avoid being deceived?
Because companies like this obtain contact information for domain name registrants through publicly available whois records, using a privacy or proxy service is sort of like getting an unlisted telephone number to eliminate unwanted solicitations. Plus, changes to whois records already made in recent years as a result of the European Union’s GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation, have already probably helped slow the tide.
But the other thing to do when receiving what appears to be a domain name invoice is simply to ask someone who knows, which is why my client contacted me about the notice it received. As a domain name attorney, I’m always on the alert for all sorts of deceptive activity, so I immediately knew what was going on here and told my client to disregard the notice.
