Domain Registration Chicanery

So, like many people (I'm sure) I own a small handful of web domains. Some of them are for business purposes and some of them are personal. I registered them over the years with a domain registration company of my choosing. Everything I do, I do through one domain registration company so I can keep it centralized. I'm about as happy as one can be with a domain registration company - the prices are reasonable (and keep dropping), they allow me to either auto-renew or manually renew them on a case by case basis. Everything is good.

Except... I am constantly bombarded with email and real-mail from people and companies that would lead me to believe that I need to do something about one or more of my web domains, or else something bad will happen. There are two techniques that continue to fill my mailboxes. The first is the ever popular "Chinese Domain Name Scam". Under this scenario you receive an email that looks very official from a Chinese Domain Registrar wherein the sender appears to want to help protect you from what they suspect are unscrupulous people trying to abscond with the Chinese version of your domain name. See more about this scam here. Suffice to say, they just want some of your money.

The second technique is one I just ran across in the last few months. While I would not necessarily refer to it as a scam, I would definitely put it under the category of "chicanery". In this scenario you get either an email or a real-mail from a legitimate domain registrar. They are informing you that one or more of your current domains are about to expire and you should renew them. The trick is that the company you receive the email from is not the one who you have the domain registered through. Unbeknownst to you, they are trying to get you to switch from your current registrar to them, so they can charge you higher rates. In all the cases I've seen, the wording in the mail is deceptive and designed to "trick" people into thinking that they should do what they say.  For example, "your domain is about to expire and failure to respond may result in the loss of your online identity", "enclosed please find an invoice in response to your request to renew your domain", and others. Unfortunately, if you respond and send payment, you will end up inadvertently switching domain registrars and, more importantly, paying much higher fees than you need to for domain registration and renewal. Even though this technique is perpetrated by legitimate domain registrars, it is little more than a trick or scam.

While these scams bother me in and of themselves, they are really nothing more than examples of a grander more insidious problem. Every day we get hit by scam after scam, spam after spam, unsolicited call after unsolicited call, over and over again. I did a quick statistical analysis and my work email address receives a junk-email every minute of every day. We read and listen to pitch after pitch and story after story. While I am no psychologist I can tell you that the non-stop and constant wave of less than scrupulous communication must be having an effect on us. I know its having an effect on me. It is making me less trusting, less interested in talking to people who try to contact me and less likely to believe the people who  I do talk to. Rather than trusting people until they give me a reason to distrust them, I start out in reverse. I have turned into a non-believer and I don't like it. I don't think it is good for society that everyone is a skeptic. When my phone rings I want to answer it, when my email beeps I want to read it and when I open an envelope from the mail, I want to believe... I just can't quite bring myself to contact that guy in Nigeria, no matter how many millions of dollars he says he wants to give me.