Have you just received a letter in the post from ‘Domain Registry of America’ (DRoA), urging you to pay them for renewing your domain name? The paper, with a London address on the back, looks like a bill and tries to scare the reader with “Your registration will expire on May 10, 2005. Act today!”
Don’t worry about your domain, this is a scam! There is no need for you to renew now, and certainly not with DRoA!
Following a few reports from our users regarding some ‘phoney bills’ they have been receiving from a company trading by the name of Domain Registry of America we felt it important to inform you of the procedure you can go through to report the issue and avoid confusion.
GreenNet has had numerous conversations at the end of June 2008 with the Office of Fair Trading and the Trading Standards department and it seems there is little they can do. Their advice is, since it’s a business-to-business dispute (the way they see it), we should get legal aid and take it up directly with DRoA.
If you receive(d) one of these letters, which at first glance may appear to be an invoice with a header on the top right warning “Domain Name Expiration Notice”, please ignore it! Do NOT complete the payment slip at the bottom or make ANY payment to this rogue company.
The letter has a UK address: 56 Gloucester Rd, Suite 526, SW7 4UB London. This happens to be the same address as Mail Boxes Etc, so it’s probably just a mail box.
We contacted DRoA directly, and confronted them about using our users information from the WHOIS database (which is legally required to be there and up-to-date) for marketing purposes. Although it is illegal to use this information to contact organisations by phone or by email, there is no law protecting users from being contacted by post.