Beware of this scammer using the name of "Domain Invest Inc".

"We are going to purchase your domain name.

Our company is in hosting and domain name business.

Please email us your desired price in USD or euros for the domain name in the subject line...."

We didn't know that domain name scam still existed today. Check this out:

"The OFT received complaints that Swansea-based Internet Registrations Bureau Limited, trading as Euro Web Designs, was contacting firms and claiming an unnamed third party was interested in registering a domain name similar to their business name.

IRBL helpfully offered to secure the domain name but told companies that they only had a limited period of time to do so before it would be offered to the third party.

The OFT asked IRBL to provide evidence that these third parties existed but the company was unable to do so."

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...

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...

Attached are 10 tips which we found on the web regarding prevention of domain name scam. I have not read these tips yet, as I don't really need them. I only need to know one... search the web to find similar occurrences or the background of the person involved.