I received a letter today which I am reporting to the Mailing Preference Service.It came from a company called the Domain Renewal Group. They have cheekily looked up who owns the domain for this website and written to me, expecting me to renew my domain with them. While they do talk about transferring it to them and thus stay just the right side of honesty, it is a cynical letter designed to get me to pay them, and take out ownership of other similar domains such as bigcircumstance.net and bigcircumstance.org.
Fortunately I am savvy enough to realise this is a scam and they won’t get away with it with me. However other people might be frightened into giving them money, thinking that otherwise they will lose their domains, when all they need to do is renew their registration with the company they have used up until now (in my case, WordPress). And why I should transfer to them when they cost twice the price of WordPress and I rely on the WordPress software – well, you tell me.
The company appears to be based in the USA but it came with a reply paid envelope that had a London address on it, and hence I am within my rights to report them to the MPS. I strongly suggest that anybody else in the UK who gets these letters and who is registered with the MPS also reports them. By not checking the MPS list of people who have opted out from direct mail they are breaking British law. Let’s put pressure on these cynical and unscrupulous companies.
Big Circumstance 
I get these too and they are such a scam…$30 for one year? Right.
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Preying on those who don’t know better or who miss the fine print. They make me sick.
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Dave..
A couple of other blogs I follow have received such……and when they have not responded, their blogs have been mysteriously hijacked. Here’s praying this does not happen to you.
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Ugh: I’ve not seen that before. Here’s hoping WordPress is sufficiently secure!
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I’ve ignore countless letters for many years and they have not hijacked my domain. So, I would not worry about that.
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I seriously doubt they’ve got any gumption for real maliciousness as they’re basically just confidence tricksters. They’re just preying on people who don’t read the fine print, getting folks to overpay for something they may not know the true cost of, then hopefully gaining control of the domains when they’ve driven away their clients with poor service.
Google Domain Slamming for a fuller story.
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I tried reading the small print and gave up. I get loads of these. I see they’ve stopped using “postage paid” evnelopes (see other blogs!).
When your web designer recommends they keeps your domain name in registered in their name and address, there is good reason.
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Yeah got my first one in the mail the other week and it stressed me out, saying that I had to reply to them before 27th december or I might lose my domain name(but not in those exact words).
I already knew my domain name only needed renewing later next year, I was confused cause I thought the letter was from my hosting/domain provider. Contacted my hosting/domain provider and they let me know about the scam.
Got a good mind to contact those ‘domain renewal group’ f**kers and give em a piece of my mind!
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A 30 second check of any unknown address on Google maps helps, in the case of 56 Gloucester Rd it shows a shop front with the name MAIL BOXES INC.
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Thanks for the tip, Brendan – what a surprise in this company’s case.
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Had a letter today saying to renew, i looked at the address site they said i had to renew and it dosn’t relate to my web site in any way, a big big scam,
They are here.
Domain Renewal Group
2316 Delaware Avenue, #266
Buffalo, New York
14216-2687
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Thanks for that, Kirk.
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