Menu

On The Hill: Radar Hill Blog

Domain Suspension Notice Scams

Est. reading time 1 minute

Stock photo of a worried man on the phone, with credit card in hand and laptop in front of himScammers are getting more creative and sneaky everyday. They are always trying to find ways to trick you into clicking links and for the most part spam is obvious, but sometimes they make their emails look like other legitimate businesses such as eBay or PayPal. When you have your own website, the ones you really need to watch out for are domain scams.

These are scammers that will send fake notices about domain renewals or suspension notices. The most recent one being a scammer posing as Tucows Inc., which is a legitimate domain registrar, that we actually do a lot of work with here at Radar Hill. This email almost even fooled us when it came through. Here is an example so you can learn how to decipher if an email is legitimate or not:

spam

See the from email? It's displaying @tucows.com.org which is not their real email address. Had it actually come from them it would be @tucows.com.

The next clue is the embedded link "Click here and download", when you hover over it you can see what the link is at the bottom of your screen. From this you can see that it is not the Tucows website and you should not click on the link, as it may download a virus to your computer or take you to an unsafe website to steal your information.

If your email program does not have this feature, right click and select "Copy Link". Different email programs may have different names for this. After you copied the link paste it into a word document or text editor to see what the link is, after all you don't want to open it if it's an email you're unsure of.


These are two great things to practice doing when dealing with emails you are unsure about. If you don't know them or it's a service you haven't used recently be sure to check all the details before clicking on anything. And of course, if you're a Radar Hill client you can always just forward it to us and we will check it out for you.