Be careful when someone you don’t know emails you a great offer to buy their domain name.
Someone is sending emails to domain name owners telling them it’s their lucky day–they can acquire the domain name Luck.com for only $45,000.
According to the sender, he knows the domain is worth a lot more but he needs the funds fast. He posted a similar message on NamePros under a different name than he is emailing from.
Don’t fall for this too-good-to-be-true offer on a domain that sold for $675,000 in 2009.
It’s important to be especially careful when someone sends an unsolicited email to you offering a domain name for sale. Do your due diligence.
Unsolicited email solicitations are a popular way to offload stolen domains. Domain thieves try to sell these domains before people realize they are stolen and you can get stuck holding the bag.
Other times it’s not an issue of domain theft. It’s just an outright scam.
DavidJCastello says
And that’s why you always use escrow.
Josh says
Tongue in cheek 😉
Sandy says
Escrow does not help if the domain was stolen. You might only know weeks after the transaction completed.
Shailendra Mishra says
Escrow wont help you here.
Even if you use escrow, you can’t keep the stolen domain rightfully, once the original owner files a domain theft case against you.
@domains says
There are other cases where you will get an email from a company about buying a domain that is similar to one you own and it’s legit. For example, you own TopName.com and they contact you to buy TopName.net or Top-Name.com. Usually they offer a domain with a hyphen, plural that doesn’t make sense, or a non .com you don’t want, but in a few cases I’ve been offered an extact match .com for a name I have in another extension, or a good singular or plural of a .com name I already have in the other. I have bought a few domains this way over the years and it’s usually only a couple hundred bucks at most through paypal, so low risk and I do a bit of digging before pulling the trigger. I almost got Coinline.com for $197 recently, as I own coinline in another extension – that would have been nice but the company’s contact pulled the name from them at the last minute. So while 95% of the time I am offered junk, the odd good name sometimes comes through. If we were talking higher amounts or a premium name, I would certainly check around more and use Escrow if following through.
Andrew Allemann says
This is true. It’s not always a scam. Just remember to be careful and do your due diligence, especially if it seems too good to be true.