Sunday, January 14, 2007

Many say Liberty Names of America are Scammers

From Dwayne: Watch for the Canadian version of the scam from "Domain Registry of Canada"

From Jim Boykin's Blog

A few months ago I got a letter in the snail mail from Liberty Names of America that looked like an invoice for a domain that was set to expire shortly. I had to give it a second look, since I knew that I had never registered a domain through a company called Liberty Names of America. My first thought was "you scammers!, Nice try….damn, how people pay these because they have no idea?" I tossed this letter in my computer bag, and meant to blog about it…but time went by and I never did…..until today.

Today I received an email from one of the hosting companies that we do business with stating:

Recently some of our customers became victims of a domain renewal fraud by the company called \"Liberty Names of America\". They send out domain transfer agreements, which look like invoices for domain renewals ($25 per year).

Be informed, that ROUThost.com has nothing to do with this company and for all domain and hosting renewals you will be contacted directly by ROUThost.com. You are free to disregard any e-mail or written communication from \"Liberty Names of America\". They have no power over your domain name unless you choose to sign up for their service.

Which reminded me of that "invoice" I was going to blog about.

I’m sure many of you have seen these letters….I found this copy of one of these letters for LIberty Names of America online (pdf) (scroll down past the first page).

How can they legally get away with sending what appear to be "invoices" when what they’re really trying to do is get your domain moved into their register account….what many are saying that amounts to Domain name hijacking.

I mean just run a search in Google for Liberty Names of America and see results like: