Domain Scam

[Sanda]

yesterday I received an email from Melbournei It, which is the company my photorenovate.com.au domain is registered with. This email was titled "your request for your registry keys." and contained the registry details of this domain with the registry keys. I did not request the keys be sent to me as I already have them. It seems somebody else has requested the keys and because I have myself as the contact the email was sent to me. I contacted my web host to find out if they had requested the keys for some admin task but they didn't. The also informed me of a current scam which is aimed at stealing domains. They have posted the following alert on their hosting site.

"Please note that the latest "scam" by unreputable companies is to email domain owners asking for there "registry key" often posing as the registration company or hosting company. By giving out this information to unknowns it is possible your domain could be stolen!"

I have not received any emails requesting my registry keys but I'm still concerned. I have emailed Melbourne It informing them that I didn not request the keys and that there is to be no changes made to my domain registration details but they are closed until after Easter of course.

I just thought I would let you all know that this scam is in existance so that you can be aware and hopefully none of us will have our domains stolen. I'm not sure what we can do to prevent this but I made sure that as soon as I saw the email I deleted it from my email account just in case these theives were able to get to my email. I just hope I did it in time.

[d_kendal]

yikes, that's lucky that you found out about this before anybody tried to scam you Sandra, thanks for alerting the rest of us!

- David

[arcadhia]

I receive an email like that but I didn't answer it for lack of time, now I know! Thanks Sandra!

[T Paul]

I got a very official email full of legalese the other day stating it was a final notice that my domain name was going to expire. It appeared that it was from my hosting company.

Now I consider all emails not from friends to be questionable. So I checked my domain information first and saw that it did not expire for some time. Next I did a Google search on the email and found it was a common scam. Basically another company trying to trick you into switching your domain to them. I notified my hosting company of the email and reported it to the FTC.

For more on the scam check out this site