Category Archives: Scams

Domain owners watch out for this new scam

A customer of ours received this email and asked us what it was.


From: <scam-company> Admin Department [mailto:admin@<scam-company>.co.uk]
Sent: 19 December 2012 02:42
To: INFO Subject: Pending Transfer-IN <your-domain-name.co.uk>

Dear Mr <your-name>, Please note that your domain <your-domain-name.co.uk> is not yet transferred to <scam-company>. Transferring of a domain name is a simple process.

Kindly contact your current registrar and ask them to change the Tag of <your-domain-name.co.uk> to “<scam-company>”.

If you required any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Kind Regards
<scam-company-contact-details>

It’s actually a scam and this is how it works. The ‘TAG’ is used by Nominet who administer all ‘.uk’ domain names. It tells Nominet which company should have administrative control over your domain name. The domain administrator (or registrar) is able to make changes to the Nameservers, DNS and most importantly, is responsible for the domain renewals.

These domain renewals cost price should only be around £5 or £6 per year as this reflects the costs charged by Nominet for the renewal, however, many companies charge many times this making this very profitable for them!

To summarise, changing the TAG moves the responsibility for the domain renewal over to the new host which means they can then start charging you for the renewals. It’s your guess whether this would mean higher or lower domain prices!

My advice, delete it and ignore it. If in doubt, ask the company who you currently pay your domain renewal fees to.