It doesn’t seem like a day goes past without some new scam hitting the headlines… and I was recently the target of a scam offering me a large sum in exchange for some of the domains owned by SoT.
The email I received was this:
Hello!
I’m an official broker of an investor from Portsmouth (UK). He is going to buy your remotepersonaltrainers.com.
My client has 408,000 euros budget for 25-30 domains. Please specify your asking price in the subject of your message.
Our company is in hosting business. We also provide brokerage services for domain investors. I’m working with many domain investors. If you have other domains for sale please email me the list. I may offer your domains to my clients.
How can we send money to you (Paypal, escrow, bank transfer or Western Union)?
If it’s your first time sale I can help you with the escrow/transfer process.
Best regards,
Ralph Bauman
Vice President Investor Relations
Space Hosting Services
The idea of this scam is that you get very excited and reply with a price. They magically agree, but want to see an appraisal from a “trusted” source first. You get directed to an appraisal provider and pay a nominal fee for the service – then they disappear.
Intrigued by the offer I emailed Ralph back asking what the next step was – he sent me a link to a forum to show me how very genuine the offer was – it was a fake Google page. I also did a ‘who.is‘ search for the email domain, which was registered to someone fairly recently and with a hotmail email address… this didn’t seem very official to me! Finally I did a search for others with the same issue and found countless reports of the scam online.
So, beware! If you receive an unsolicited email and it looks too goo to be true it almost certainly is… do some research online and don’t part with any cash until you’re absolutely positive the email is genuine.
