A New URL Registration Scam

Daryn — Fri, 22 May 2009 04:12:42 +0000

This picture is completely irrelevant.

We received an email the other day at work from someone trying to sell a URL for a bloated price. It’s a pretty common practice and I’m sure any web designer reading this has encountered it at least once or twice in their career. Companies or individuals that solely make a living off of buying and selling domain names. Fair enough.

This latest method was kind of comical and at the same time it was clever; in a dirty, annoying care salesman kind of way. It starts off like you would expect. “I see that you are the owner of [DOMAINNAME].org…” blah, blah, blah, and then it goes on to the sender talking about how they have ownership of the same domain but in .com format. “Sounds awesome! How much are you sel….50 bucks??” (well, it didn’t really go down like that but I had to make this less boring). To be fair, $50 was a whole lot lower than what I expected the “seller” to want for it. Usually they get greedy.

Out of curiousity, my colleague decided to open up Terminal and run a whois on the domain, just to see if we could get some insight on this “company”. This is the kicker: the domain was available for purchase. So what happened next? I’m sure you’ve already figured it out for yourself, smarty pants. My colleague purchased the domain for 8 bucks. He even had a discount code! Following his victory, he proceeded to send back a response to the aforementioned email. It went something like:

“Thanks for the heads up on the domain”, “We’ve purchased it…”

Hilarity ensued. We never received a reply (wow, shocker) but between me and him we found it to be pretty hilarious in a nerdy kind of web guy way.

In your face!

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A New URL Registration Scam

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