Take care with offers to renew your website domain name registration

There has been a recent growth in the number of letters being sent to companies urging them to take action about website domain names. These letters, often headed ‘domain expiration notice’ or similar, urge you to send money to renew your domain registration. In most cases, you would be well advised to ignore them.

It would be wrong to say that all these letters are scams, as many are from legitimate domain registration organisations who clearly say that they are asking you to switch rather than renew your registration. But some of them make it look as though you have no alternative other than to send a cheque for £60 or more. Some of these may well be scams, taking money from domain name owners but giving nothing in return. One letter we received at Titman Firth did not give a website address for the company who sent it, which immediately set alarm bells ringing. We later established it was a scam.

So how do the senders of these letters get your postal address in the first place? In fact, it’s easy for anyone providing domain name registration services - or scammers - to track down your postal address. There are ‘whois’ search’ tools on various websites that let you enter a domain name and see the postal address of whoever registered that domain.

What should you do?

If you receive a letter claiming to offer the continuation of your domain name registration, you should contact whoever currently deals with your domain name. In most cases this will be whoever created and maintains your website. They will be able to confirm whether the letter you have received is genuinely connected to your current registration.

Alternatively, if you set up the domain registration yourself, you can check that the letter you receive is from the same organisation with whom you dealt when registering the domain name.

In summary, although you certainly do have to pay to renew your domain name registration from time to time, as long as you have been happy with the service from your current provider you should be very careful when switching.

Finally, you should be aware of another type of approach. You might be called by someone who says that a third party has applied to register a domain that matches your company name, or another version of your current domain name. You are asked to pay £100 or more to secure the domain for yourself. Most of these calls are again scams: there is rarely a third party seeking to register the name, and even if there were, no legitimate registration company would try to create a bidding war between applicants.

© Titman Firth 2005