I received the message below this morning. It is a scam, I have seen them before, but it is easy to be caught out. You may receive one of these around the time your domain name is up for renewal. It is possible for a third party to find out when your domain name is due to be renewed, and therefore generate this email. An unsuspecting person might assume it is to do with the domain name, and was expecting a bill. If you see anything like this and you are not sure send it to me.
Taking it apart
When you first look at this you can see it is related to a domain name, it is something for accounts payable, and there is a line in there which says “This notice for www.domainname.com will be terminated on December 14th 2019.” At this point you may be feeling anxious.
Looking more closely it is a proposal to add your domain name to a search engine, or “search engine registration” something I do for you for free, and only takes a few minutes anyway. There is also the veiled threat that “……. cancellation of this proposal making it difficult for your customers to find you on the web”.
Other things to watch out for
The telephone number is a random set of characters, the link to their website is obfuscated. So you cannot tell exactly where it is going to unless you click on it. If you click on it, you do not know what will happen. At best it is someone fronting a dodgy scam that is probably not illegal, but is highly questionable designed to catch people out. With those types of links they forward to another link, but register that someone has clicked it.
Don’t Panic
Call me, or send me a copy if you receive something like this. Other common scams are from people allegedly offering to sell you more traffic. On the basis that more traffic will yield more contacts. Chatty emails that say “Hi, I have just been looking at your website, you should be getting more traffic, I can help you…….” No third party can know how much traffic you get without access to the hosting, or to a Google Analytics account. These are scams too.
Looking around sites some seem to be targetted more than others, and depending when you look, they may get tired of one site and switch to somewhere else. While we can detect and stop computers posting spam on sites, there is no fix for people posting messages through forms or contacting people directly. Only where the message is a common message and it has been detected as spam, and provided you are using spam filtering will it get caught.
I have looked at the originating IP address of many of these messages in the past. A lot of them come from India and the Philippines. Both places where people can be exploited for a few dollars a day.