Friendly Reminder or Deceptive Marketing?

Yesterday a friend of mine sent me a copy of an email he received regarding the renewal of a domain name he owned, which was due to expire. Since the information in the email was correct, he clicked on the renewal link provided. At this point he became dubious of the email—and for good reason. As in most cases like this, at first glance you would find it difficult to spot anything out of the ordinary with this type of email and would simply presume that it was a friendly reminder from your ISP to re-register your domain name.  

When the link provided in the email is clicked (in order to supposedly renew the domain) it brings you to a site where you are presented with a page like the one shown below. Again, there is nothing really out of the ordinary and all appears nice and professional:
 

Once you start to look at their pricing structure, however, things begin to seem a bit suspicious. According to the site Regselect.com you can renew your domain name for one year for as little as $8 USD, as opposed to the $79.95 proposed by this site for the same service. Upon querying my friend for some more details, I found out that he had never used or heard of ISPrenewal before he received the email. Initially he had thought it was his current ISP sending him a friendly reminder to renew his domain name registration. I followed this information up with a quick check on the ICANN.org site and without surprise found no mention of a registrar called ISPrenewal. A little more digging on the Domainrenewal-online.org site and I found the following section in their terms and conditions:

“The following terms and conditions apply to this Agreement and ISP acceptance of your request for services :(a) ISP may elect to accept or reject your domain name registration application or renewal application for any reason, at its sole discretion. (b) This Agreement is published at the web address http://www.isprenewal.com.”

Again, with no surprise I found that ISPrenewal.com would not resolve and was offline. A quick Web search followed, which further helped me to realize that this type of email was nothing new, but was making a strong comeback of late.

Armed with this information I decided to take a chance and call them on the UK telephone number provided on their website. Now, to my surprise, a polite lady with an Eastern European-sounding accent answered the phone. After questioning her about their offer in comparison to other registrar offers, she simply informed me that the choice was up to me. I finished up by asking how they got hold of my contact details and again was politely informed that she just answers the phone and was not “technical.”

Well, the way in which they get hold of contact details is really no mystery. They are simply harvesting contact details and domain expiration dates from a WHOIS database. They are then using this information to send targeted marketing emails to registered domain contacts whose domain name is close to its expiration date. The site even uses scare tactics and warns of the following late fee:

“There will an administrative fee of 95 Euros per domain if you submit the renewal request after the expiry date of your domain.”

Having decided not to use their services offered, I cannot say for sure whether the domain would be registered following payment; therefore, I can’t say for sure if the site is legit. I’ll let the readers make their own minds up on this one. ☺