In the early days of the internet, most people are not familiar with domain name registration, web hosting services, etc. Most of us would engage someone who is familiar with all these so that they can do all the work for us.

Is this a good idea or bad idea?

Joe Clark wrote about his experience in a recent domain name scam. As we can see, the scammers are pretending to be software developers and are buying the domain name to be resold. They basically make money from the scam by offering domain name appraisal service (probably the same person). The usual counter against such a scam is to ask the buyer to seek domain appraisal themselves. Stick to your price, and if they don't like, just forget about them.
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"I was entertained this week by a domain name appraisal scammer. The weekend before I opened up a sedo.co.uk account to manage my domain name parking pages. Since Sedo manage the adverts on the parking page, its an easy way for setting up a passive income stream on domains that are currently without websites. Over the course of eight years I've built up a healthy collection of domain names, most of them are ideas I've yet to develop. I think only one of them I bought purely for speculation.

Within days of setting up the sedo account and mapping all my currently undeveloped domains to their DNS, I get my first offer...

Joe Clark, visit his site below.

Slightly more than a year ago, an internet spammer called Peter Francis-Macrae (aka Weaselboy) was sentenced to 6 years imprisonment for offering domain names which he does not own. He had used spams to trick victims into paying him to register for new European Internet addresses ending in “.eu”. This scam alone earned him £200,000 in a fortnight, out of a total of 425k GBP in all the scams.

(This Picture is taken from bbc.co.uk)

In the recent months, there have been several reports of domain name scam from someone called "Jon Hegglund". In summary, they will ask you for the domain price and thereafter ask the domain name to be appraised by a domain name appraisal service of their choice...