What do you think: aggressive sales campaign or fraud?

Posted By: Sorin Mustaca August 26, 2015

What do you think after you quickly read this letter?

What makes this email special:

addressed to me, using the data from the domain registration (mandatory things, which my registrar added)
uses my domain name
A lot of red text
written in capitals
special keywords like “notice”, “important”, “notification”, “expiration”, “act”, “immediately”
has a clear deadline on it

First time I read it I went very quickly and I thought that they try to take over my domain by requiring me to “prolong” the registration with them.

This would have required to transfer the domain to them and then pay yearly fees to them.

Very well done, I have to say.

But, if you read it carefully, you see that it doesn’t actually offer you to prolong the registration of the domain!

It is an offer to purchase automatic submission to search engines for 64$.

The URLs in the email are specially created for mustaca.com domain.

After I changed the URL to not point to my domain, it looks like this:

So, is this an aggressive sales campaign or is it a fraud?

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Sorin Mustaca

Sorin Mustaca, (ISC)2 CSSLP, CompTIA Security+ and Project+, is working since over 20 years in the IT Security industry and worked between 2003-2014 for Avira as Product Manager for the known products used by over 100 million users world-wide. Today he is CEO and owner of Endpoint Cybersecurity GmbH focusing on Cybersecurity, secure software development and security for IoT and Automotive. He is also running his personal blog Sorin Mustaca on Cybersecurity and is the author of the free eBook Improve your security .