High pressure domain name scam targets charities
Howard Lake | 24 October 2002 | News
While it is essential that your charity protects its reputation online by acquiring relevant domain names, you should ignore the companies using high pressure sales and scare tactics to persuade you to buy them at an inflated cost.
Battersea Dogs Home warned charities earlier this month about a company that had contacted them and tried to persuade them to buy domain names from them. The company said that it was helpfully warning the charity that another unnamed company was registering names similar to its own but with suffixes such as uk.com, eu.com and gb.com. It then tried to persuade the Dogs Home to register the names for two years for £300 each. The usual fee is under £70 + VAT.
A similar approach was made to Guy’s & St Thomas’ Hospital Trust. Susan Pollock, Web manager at Guy’s, told vnunet.com “Three people pursued me saying that someone was trying to register variations on the Guy’s Hospital domain name which would direct users to sites with inappropriate material.” They tried to sell nine domain names to the hospital at a total cost of £1,400, about £1,130 more than the average cost.
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These scams should not put you off registering relevant domain names for your charity. However, there are plenty of legitimate domain registration companies so you do not need to pay premium prices. You can find out about domain name issues at Nominet, the national registry for .uk registered names. If you contacted by high pressue sales companies Nominet recommends that you take down details and make a complaint to the local trading standards office.
Read “Domain name scams hit the NHS” by Dinah Greek at vnunet.com.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.