Beware of letters from “Domain renewal group”
We have received several requests for information regarding a letter from “Domain Renewal Group”, which seems to have arrived during the previous days with owners of .com and .net domain names in Belgium and The Netherlands.
Full letter
First of all: this letter tries to mislead you into thinking that you need to pay them to simply renew your domain name. The letter tells you that not doing so may “result in loss of your online identity”.
If you have a closer look at the letter, then in small print you will notice that you’re actually transferring your domain name to them. This probably isn’t what you where expecting. Certainly not if you notice, after the transfer, that your domain name has indeed moved, but it is no longer working since your website and e-mail where configured elsewhere.
If you receive any requests regarding your domain name, we advice you to contact your current domain name registrar since they will be able to tell you what is real and what isn’t.
If you search on the internet for “Domain Renewal Group”, then you won’t find too much information yet. As this seems to be a new name they’ve only recently started using. In the past the same company sent very similar letter but on letter head of “Domain registry of America”. They have become rather notorious with these practices. They must have noticed that too many people knew their old name to still be fooled by them.
When looking into their Whois-information, you will however notice that they have registered their own domain name through “Domain Registry of America” and that they are located at the exact same address.
As a matter of fact, they bothered to change their name, but didn’t bother too much with changing the lay-out of the letter they send.
This company has been working like this for a very long time now. We found a court ordering them to seize their practices, which dates back to 2003. They have since slightly changed the contents of their letters, just enough to stay within the law. But judging from the requests for information we received the previous days, they managed to keep it confusing enough to mislead people.