Scam – Domain name registration / SEO service registration
As if the e-mail scams aren’t bad enough, they are now texting photographers with the same scam! But there is another scam that has been going around for years now – but it is so obvious that I doubt many people will fall for it. But just in case anyone has any doubt, or may be a touch too inattentive, this next one is also a scam – fake domain renewals / SEO service registration.
If you have a website – and this means everyone – then you have received these emails, warning you to renew your domain. There are also emails with instruction that you need to renew your search engine submission. I guess that this takes them out of the realm of outright fraud, since they will most likely add your website to Google?
It’s all purposely very vague, cloaked with mis-directing language. There’s even a warning about “failure to complete” resulting in making it difficult for clients to find you on the internet.
This important expiration notification notifies you about the expiration offer notice of your domain registration for search engine submission. The information in this expiration notification may contain confidential and/or legally privileged information from the notification processing department of the Domain SEO Service Registration to purchase our SEO Traffic Generator. This information is intended only for the use of the individual(s) named above.
If you fail to complete your domain name registration search engine service by the expiration date, may result in the cancellation of this domain name notification offer notice.
This scam – domain name registration / SEO service registration – is quite laughable and very obvious, but I wanted to add it to the list of scams that are out there.
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Hi Neil,
I am a software engineer and a big fan of yours. Learned a lot from you via this website and your videos.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vast field with no fixed rules as Google is the only Ruler which keep on changing things. It is not just about submitting your website URL to Google Web Crawlers, but to optimize the page titles and content with unique search terms which increases your Google search page ranking and other related stuff. Most importantly, it is not a day Job, it takes a long time to build page ranking with Google.
The letter content looks all fake, but you can’t prove them fraud as they very carefully drafted the language/wording of the letter.
The best way to safeguard yourself from such people is to NOT put your real or exact contact address in domain Registration contact info. Domain Name registrar will never likely to reach you over physical address, only via emails. Don’t put Phone info as well, otherwise the only call you will get is from such people of their marketing dept. :-)
For Email in contact info, you can put a secondary one, and put filter to FWD emails from your domain registrar to your real email, and for phone you can use Google voice number, where you can even set it up to always go to voice mail.
As long as you are very well aware of your domain renewal dates, or set it up for auto-renewal, you don’t have to worry about your domain registration contact info to be dead correct, which is the only way for these guys to scam you.
Best Regards
Sanjeev
i agree on using a Google Voice number for site registration. Google will transcribe the voice mail and email it to you. The transcribing is not all that great, but it gets enough of it right for you to know if you should really go listen to it or not. If you have the google voice app, you can read the transcription there as well, and delete the voicemails as they come in.