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Utah Man Accused of Domain Name Renewal Scam

Allegedly, Ronald Robert Scott of Utah has swindled individuals and companies out $1.8 million or more by sending out fake renewal notices via US mail.  Thousands of domain owners received renewal notices in the mail for domains they actually owned and sent in payment to companies Scott created thinking they were paying for renewal fee.  In most cases these parties paid out of fear of losing the domain name which they need for their companies websites.

I have personally received dozens of these types of emails.  The DomainNameUSA.net company rings very familiar, I know I have tossed many of their letters into the recycle bin at the post office without bothering to open them.  Bad thing is I didn’t know when I was receiving these letters that this was a pure scam, I originally thought it was a sneaky way for a registrar grow a customer base  of overpaying customers.  Since I never considered sending in a renewal fee to one of the weasel companies I never did any further research on any of them.

$1.8 million is a lot of money though, I can’t believe that for a couple years this guy had tens of thousands of payments coming in from thin air by simply using the USPS and simple whois lookup.  It’s sad people still waste their time thinking of schemes like this instead of something worthwhile that will make money over time.

While we are on this note…  Beware people! Everyday there are more and more scam alerts and stolen domains popping up..  take precaution with your portfolios and use your head when managing your portfolios and sensitive information.

News Source (SLTrib.com)

About the author

Mike

9 Comments

  • I didn’t realize this was a scam either. I just throw the letters out, but I thought they were trying to get me to move my domains to them.

  • Yeah.. sadly we could have saved less informed registrants lots of $$… after I opened the first letter from them I never did again. I am surprised it took this long to uncover though!

  • Got more than 10 a month here is Ireland from these fools and others! Glad theyre getting busted as pissed me off bigtime!

  • Yes.. Very annoying, and illegal!! So they were sending out International correspondence too? I had no idea. Thanks for chiming in IrishDomainer!

  • If I recall correctly the renewal rates were crazy high too, like $60 a year or something. At the rates he was “charging” he could have made a legit profit actually renewing the domain for them in the first place.

  • Tom – ya, I got higher ones than that. I remember seeing invoices for $125 for my “renewal”.

  • Is there a Picture of Ronald Robert Scott of Utah ??
    Anyone know anything else about him ??
    Thanks for sharing the info – and for any responses to my questions… (smile)
    ~Patricia – DomainBELL

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