Trademark owners and business owners of all sizes may be be confused when they receive notices that look like invoices for domain name renewals -- but, in fact, they're for nothing more than a domain name "listing" service and can typically be safely ignored.
In this video, I discuss the difference between legitimate domain name renewal notices that must be paid to maintain a domain name registration and solicitations for domain name “listing” services that arguably provide negligible benefit and are relatively expensive.
Personally, I received one of these solicitations for one of my own domain names, and I can see how some people would be confused about whether it’s a bill that must be paid — even though it included a disclaimer that it is not a bill and that it is for marketing services.
In some ways, these notices are nothing new. As I discuss in the video, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) warned about something similar in 2010 when it issued an alert about “con artists who allegedly posed as domain name registrars and convinced thousands of U.S. consumers, small businesses and non-profit organizations to pay bogus bills by leading them to believe they would lose their Web site addresses unless they paid.” And in 2014, ICANN warned about what it called a domain name “registration renewal scam” in which emails are sent requesting payment for domain name renewals but are actually nothing more than an attempt to “fraudulently obtain financial information.”
The notice I received purports to offer some benefit — by listing domain names in a directory, along with reviews. But I don’t really see the benefit, and apparently neither have some other people who have reported the solicitations to the Better Business Bureau (BBB).
In any event, in the video I discuss some best practices to possibly avoid receiving these solicitations — and, if you do, how to avoid being deceived by them.
