On The Hill: Radar Hill Blog

Spammers and scammers have been trying extra hard lately to get your money. We've seen an increase in spam emails and phone scams around the world—probably due to spam not being as effective as it used to be, forcing scammers to send out even more in order to get the same return.

We've seen a lot of domain slamming—scams that target web domains—reported to our office in particular. Because the process of registering and maintaining a domain can be confusing and people don't always understand it, it's often easy for scammers to convince people that they're a legitimate domain company.

The most recent phone scam we've come across involves a California-based company called InternetCrusade that is calling real estate agencies and agents across North America, telling them that they need to "take urgent action on their domain". If you receive a call from 1-866-377-0627 regarding your web domain, it's a scam! Their aim is to get real estate agents to transfer their websites to InternetCrusade's domain management, regardless of whether the websites already have adequate domain hosting.

Instead, keep the following in mind when it comes to your website domains:

• You shouldn't ever receive letters in the mail about renewing your domain unless you've chosen to make that your regular payment method (we've already seen several scammy letters sent by the fraudulent Domain Registry of Canada).
• You should never receive a phone call about making changes to your domain.
• Know who's in charge of handling the domain for your website—or, if you're managing your own site, who your domain is registered with. Keep their contact information written down somewhere you can easily find it, and compare it with the contact information of anyone who contacts you about your domain. This makes it easier to spot phone scams, email scams and mail scams.

If you deal directly with your domain provider, the majority of them will only ever try to get a hold of you through an Administrative Contact email that you set. Of course, we manage all domains on our clients' behalf, so if you have a Radar Hill website and you're contacted by anyone else about your domain, ignore it and report it!

You can report all phone scams to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (including any telemarketing calls that don't follow the rules). You can also report scammers to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.

Remember: Stay smart, and stay secure!