One of my clients got an unsolicited email from “Blue Ridge Hosting” that I wanted to pass along. I’m not sure whether this is a scam or not, but I’ve emailed both the person who originated the email and submitted a contact form via the Blue Ridge Hosting website - and to date have receive no response from either. I’m always suspicious when clients’ domain expiration dates are being watched by other people, and so to be safe, wanted to show you what the email looked like.

Since my client has her domain ownership kept private by DreamHost, the email was sent to [email protected]. The email was from: [email protected] and the subject was “domain clientsdomainname”.

Here’s the email, with my client’s actual domain name replaced by “clientdomainname.com”:

Dear owner of clientdomain.com,

I noticeded [sic] that your domain “clientdomain.com” expires in a few weeks, which means that it is going to be publicly available soon. I’d like to buy this domain name before it expires.

I assume that you are not interested in keeping it for yourself.

I can buy this domain for $60 plus any renewal related expenses. What do you think?

Erica Buckner,
[email protected]

As I mentioned, I emailed Erica and also filled out a contact form for Blue Ridge Hosting asking whether there was someone named Erica working there and why they were trying to purchase one of my client’s domain names - neither method resulted in a reply. I looked up BlueRidgeHosting.com and the whois info said it was in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

You may be asking, how did they know that the domain was going to expire soon? Domain name expiration dates are public information. This is why, if you intend to keep your domain name, you set your domain registration to “auto renew” so that no one can grab it if it happens to expire and you forget to renew it manually. My client had it set to “auto renew” but it hadn’t renewed itself yet.

I can only speculate why this person, whoever they are, is attempting to purchase one of my client’s domains for a measly $60 - we’re talking about a very well established business with a high amount of website traffic and many sales. It makes no sense, unless it’s some kind of scam, or perhaps a competitor? I have no idea, but just in case some of you out there have received the same email, I wanted to post it here, because you can’t be too careful.

And when you get strange emails regarding your website, it’s always best to ask your web designer or do some research yourself before answering. There are lots of scam artists out there trying to take advantage of small business owners who have websites.

If I hear from the person or someone else from the company, I’ll post it here to let you know the outcome.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 3:28 pm and is filed under the Spam & Scam Watch category. Read other Aldebaran Website Design Blog articles by returning to main blog page. Need a blog added to your website? Click here to read about blog installation services or click here to contact Aldebaran Web Design. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.