Looking through the pile of old mail yesterday (the mail that I didn’t need to reply to, but kept for one reason or another) I have found a piece of mail received in 2009 when one of my domain names was coming up for renewal. The letter came from a company called Domain Renewal Group. As I glanced over the text of it, I instantly remembered why I kept this one — because I wanted to blog about it… Here’s that letter:
They were reminding me of the fact that my domain registration was about to expire, and offered to renew it… at $30 a year! Whoa there!! You mean it’s gonna cost me only 30 bucks to renew something that I can renew at $6.99 directly with the registrar?!
Then I tried to Google them, and this company seems to be so popular (in searches) that just upon typing in “domain renewal” Google suggests two key phrases directly related to Domain Renewal Group:
Not exactly the kind of popularity every brand would like, but the second one certainly explain a lot.
These guys stretch all the way across the globe aswell. I was used to getting emailed by companies to renew my domain, by getting snail mail was crazy to me. Especially since i live all the way in New Zealand, so these guys were air-mailing it out!
Haha, yes I get these letters all the time for my domains (they only seem to target the .coms rather than the .co.uks).
As soon as I open them up and see the familiar logo, they get passed straight to the shredder 😀
Yes, I’ve read many of the complaints prior to posting this, and they come from all over the globe. One thing I keep wondering though is why do people keep buying into this? Are they sending these bill-like letters directly to corporate addresses of the companies that don’t even know how much this service should cost (or already costs them)?
Like other types of scammers, they pray on the uninformed, I am not big into regulation, but it’s one area I would like to see the FTC get involved in.
Yeah you’re right, I wonder how many people are falling for the letters. Surely people should know how much it cost them to register their domain and therefore be able to figure out that $30 is rather high.
Corporate companies not knowing the cost like you suggest is probably the closest I could get to an explanation!