I own a business that provides managed web services to other small businesses.
Our clients get these kinds of letters all the time, and we’ve had several instances of being asked after-the-fact whether they’re legitimate. Often this happens when these kinds of letters go to accounting and are paid automatically to prevent whatever deleterious effects are described by the letter.
The letters my clients have gotten sometimes make it sound to the uninformed like they’re ambiguously tied to domain availability or registration.
We have to educate and restate our guidance on this several times a year.
I should start sending out proactive reminders that it’s a waste of money.
Within two weeks of registering a new company, I had people calling me saying they were from "the copier company" asking me to confirm the copier model number so they could send my "regular shipment."
Eventually instead of just hanging up, I started saying "who even uses a copier anymore?" which evolved into "who we dont have a copier, we're paperless." None of that helped.
What stopped them was wasting their time asking where to find the copper model number, acting like I had to go into another room to see it, coming back with fictitious brands ("I think it's a Magnet Box model 639173638483827483" "Flowerstrenginsen. Is that a copier?" "All I see is a knob for lighter, darker, and bagel").
This scam has been going on for a very long time. I remember a friend of mine at work in ~2002 getting a letter like this, it could have even been the same scammer, claiming the same unpaid bill.
These letters stopped for me when I enabled whois privacy on my domains. Which sucks, because if you need to get a hold of another domain holder... you have to basically pray that the registrar will give you the information (or pass your contact information along), or lawyer up and sue them for it.
Does DomainNetworks actually provide some kind of service? It seems to me that they could evade prosecution if they do actually provide a service, even if it's trivial and low-effort, and they can hide behind the ambiguity of their "billing" practices that in fact they are simply a solicitation for service.
I have seen this before, where a company will offer promotional services such as putting a business in the Yellow Pages or SEO listings in all the major engines, and it's a legit service that anyone could offer, but they make it appear like you already have a relationship with them, and therefore an obligation to "keep paying" them.
Our clients get these kinds of letters all the time, and we’ve had several instances of being asked after-the-fact whether they’re legitimate. Often this happens when these kinds of letters go to accounting and are paid automatically to prevent whatever deleterious effects are described by the letter.
The letters my clients have gotten sometimes make it sound to the uninformed like they’re ambiguously tied to domain availability or registration.
We have to educate and restate our guidance on this several times a year.
I should start sending out proactive reminders that it’s a waste of money.
Edit for typos.