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Domain Renewal Scams and Search Engine Scams

So many of my clients have received emails like this that I feel I should warn people.

Emails like this:

Don’t miss out on this offer which includes search engine submission for “InsertYourdomainnamehere”.com for 12 months. There is no obligation to pay for this order unless you complete your payment by 3/10/2019. Our services provide submission and search engine ranking for domain owners. This offer for submission services is not required to renew your domain registration.

Failure to complete your search engine registration by 3/10/2015 may result in the cancellation of this order (making it difficult for your customers to locate you using search engines on the web).

Then they include a big colourful link to make your payment.
Normally I don’t rant but this really frosts me. This part here:

“(making it difficult for your customers to locate you using search engines on the web).”

is a big fat lie!! don’t believe it! These are not SEO companies. You can submit your own website for SEO if you want. Plus, it is free to submit your website to search engines. If you need help with SEO, hire a Company or person you know and trust.

Plus, to make it look like they are complying with the new CASL laws they add an address to make their scam look legitimate:

You have received this message because you elected to receive special notifications and offers. If you no longer wish to receive our special notices, please unsubscribe here,(No Don’t! Block the sender or flag it as junk!) or mail us a written request to the attention of: Customer Contact Manager, PO Box 4668 New York, NY 10163. Please allow up to four weeks for the complete unsubscribe process to take place. NOTE: If you have multiple accounts with us, you must opt out for each one individually in order to fully stop receiving these notifications. This message is CAN-SPAM compliant. (No it isn’t!)
Please do not reply to this email, as we are not able to respond to messages sent to this address.

This should be a big red flag. Legitimate companies allow you to reply.

Do a Google search for the address. This particular address has 5 businesses at this PO box. None of which are Tech or SEO Companies.

If you receive a notice that your domain is expiring, phone your host before handing over money. Another email scam that my clients often contact me about is domain renewal. They receive an email saying that their domain is about to expire and if they don’t pay now they will loose their domain. These emails are quite clever and it is easy to be fooled by them. This really frosts me. Not only do they get your money under false pretenses they steal the domain from your registrar and possibly even steal it from you.

So, please be very careful when renewing your domain.