MyDomain.com Scam - domain registration fraud costing consumers millions
I just received an email from a rather interesting company - the people behind MyDomain.com Congratulations, MyDomain.com, I’ve giving you the 2008 Scam of the Year award. Readers of this blog, take note, this is slick and it’s owners are probably making millions every month. They are making it from spam email, domain look up scripting, credit card fraud, “professional phony website” - the whole works people. These people got the online registration domain name fraud game goin on! Check out this picture below:
They got to me through my email - spam. Then I clicked on the domain they say I owe and the page is full of high paying google/yahoo text contextual advertisements. This type of stuff is still going on after Yahoo and Google saying they would no longer doing; well over a year ago. So advertisers are still basically getting fleeced from google and yahoo’s contextual advertising system. In many cases Yahoo and Google still do this with domain parking companies. So you can monetize a large pool of domains and it is believes that many of these millions of registered domains only receive “type-in traffic”. This proves that users are getting to these sites through “highly-suspicious” means of advertising (a.k.a. spam).
In the picture above this is the parked page that I went to after getting the email. This page is optimized out to the max. I would say it would have one of the highest CTR rates of many parked landing pages. Now the people carrying this out know they cant send too many people to the same domain. So they have about 1K domains or so. Most of the landing pages are probably consumer good websites. They every day they email about 15-30 people with an email just like this, constantly rotating through their domains so Google/Yahoo don’t get suspicious and boot them from their parked page API whatever they call it. So every day these people are able to generate tens of thousands through sending spam email to parked landing pages that the person receiving the email doesnt really even own. Can you say run on sentence?! So anyhow, back to this domain registrar parked landing page doing on.
This is the website I was brought to in order to “renew” my domain. Which isn’t even registered with this company to begin with. So basically they are either criminally stealing customers from other registrars, or just trying to dummy you into thinking you actually registered something when in fact you just got billed and never recieved anything in the first place.
The image above is what the website looks like and is. It looks just like a real registrar and you would never know the difference. I dont know if you can actually make a purchase from this page - I didnt test. Anyhow, this is the base of operations for this company. This is because they actually look like a large registrar and may actually BE a large registrar, I dont know. Anyhow, so they can get the license from google or yahoo, register a bunch of domains, and actually make it look like they are a registrar then just sent out spam email on the domains they own. Enough said. Interesting scam, and if you want to help end bullshit like this, please contact the owner of GoDaddy.com, Bob Parsons, or contact your current registrar that you have been working with for years, and let them know so they can help end this.
Tags: criminal domain registrars, domain name phishing, domain name registration phishing, domain name stealing, domain phishing, domain registrar fake, domain registration fraud, fake domain registrar, known fake domain registrars, mydomain.com, mydomains.com scam
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I recently sold a blog which was on MyDomain. That company always made me nervous. I felt like they were going to steal my stuff or somehow botch up my domain sale. Luckily, I sold it and got outta there!