Tricky renewal notices get people to renew subscriptions through a third party.
Remember Domain Registry of America, the group that tricked* people into renewing domain names at exorbitant prices?
This type of scam didn’t start with the domain name industry, and it doesn’t end there, either.
Apparently newspapers and magazines across the country are grappling with more than just falling advertising revenues. They’re dealing with an outfit sending misleading renewal notices to newspaper subscribers. Here’s a warning from The Austin American-Statesman (pdf).
The notices get people to go to a web site to submit a payment or to send payment to a post office box.
The local paper’s notice wrongly names a parked domain PublisherPayment.com as one of the offenders. They actually meant PublishersPayment.com, which looks like this:
Many of these schemes try to skirt the law with disclaimers or misleading statements. For example, the company representing that it’s taking hotel reservations for Affiliate Summit might not actually say it’s doing it on behalf of Affiliate Summit.
* I use “tricked” in the past tense here with the hopes that ICANN has successfully shut this down.
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