Domain Names for Fun and Investing

Link: http://www.namepros.com/warnings-and-alerts/729311-one-word-coms-strange-offer-emails.html

I think it's just great the way the Internet changes and expands not only in size and diversity, but also expands our awareness and feeds creativity. But not all of this creativity is positive.

Take spam for example. We used to just get simple messages that wanted us to visit a site or buy something. Then we got veriations of the Nigerian advance fee scam, and so many persons with schemes to make millions if only they had a little help from us. Then Phishing became popular and I just got a PayPal phishing email that used a URL that almost fooled me. I'm sure many will fall for this new version.

Anyway, while this newest development is not as harmful as phishing emails, it's still spam that brings benefit to those that send it, while attempting to hide what they are doing. It works like this:

You get an email from someone that is interested in buying your domain name. The text of the message seems like some person wrote it just to you and it mentions the name of your domain. The message is signed and also seems real, but rather than real contact information that can be checked, they list their web site URL. The couple of these that I have seen are not junk domain names, but some pretty nice ones that are worth quite a bit and could be used to create a site that could generate some serious income if done right.

If you reply to this person you may or may not get a reply, but they will never buy your domain name, The only purpose is to get you and others to visit their site. While the site is well-designed and seems professional, you quickly discover that it is not a site where they conduct business, it's just full of Google AdSense ads. The one contact page I looked at just had an email address, no name, company name, address, or phone numbers. And this was for a site that sells used cars...!!!

I did some searches and they use WHOIS privacy protection so you can't easily find out who they are, but I think I know. It's pretty hard for anyone on the web to hide from me when I get into looking seriously. It's a domainer who either can't sell their valuable domain name, or someone who bought the domain and decided to use spam to drive traffic to their ad site rather than develop it or use SEO like honest people do.

To see at least 3 examples of this spam ( I can't call it a scam since they steal your time and not your money.) check out this thread on the NamePros.com forum. If you get this or other spam about selling or buying domain names, please consider reporting it. Reporting spam does make a difference and if more people did it we would not get so much junk. It would also help to raise awareness and maybe domain owners like this one would not get the wrong idea that a new clever way to spam is acceptable because it makes them some money.