I need advice on whether or not I've been scammed by a domain taster and their registrar affiliate, or whether or not I've just been the victim of totally incompetent companies with terrible customer service and terrible business practices? I got an email offering to sell me the ".com" version of the ".net" domain name that I own. I've never bought a domain name in that way, but I really wanted the ".com" version. So I went ahead and bought the name online from the domain re-seller company. It turns out that the company operates in a very unprofessional, sloppy, and misleading (in my opinion) way and I lost a full day's work trying to get them to come through on what they promised me. They had emailed me a confirmation receipt and told me over the phone that I was the full owner of the domain. They didn't give me any instructions, however, on how the name transfer would work and their online receipt didn't indicate my ownership in clear language. It had the price I paid and the name of the domain but it didn't make my ownership clear. I had to make many aggressive phone calls to get information on how the ownership would be transferred to me. The phone customer service was very amateurish and had the "feel" of an in-house operation. This company might be a small outfit run out of someone's basement. That's the feel I got from the unprofessional, clueless customer rep. I dealt with multiple times. After multiple phone calls, the unhelpful rep. told me to open up an account with namescout.com (a domain registrar) , give them (the company I bought the domain name from) my namescout.com user name, and that they (the domain reseller company) would "push" my domain into my namescout.com account and then from that point on, I would manage everything through namescout.com. They told me that my domain would be pushed in within fifteen minutes or so of the end of our phone conversation. I did what they told me. 24 hours later, no record of my ownership of the domain with namescout.com, and my name does NOT appear on WHOIS. SO basically I'm not the owner. I called namescout and namescout said they had no record of the domain name I bought, or of my association with it. They also told me they hadn't heard of the domain seller/reseller I bought the domain name from, but that it was possible that that company was a domain reseller. I called the original company again and the unhelpful and rude customer rep. gave me the run around. I was very assertive and the customer rep. told me that she would contact her manager. I was very concerned and called my credit card company to find out how to stop payment/dispute the charges. I had paid for a domain name and I did not receive the goods. The domain name reseller kept insisting I was now the owner of the domain but had no tangible evidence to prove it. I told them I had followed their directions and opened up an account with namescout.com , and gave them (the reseller) the account name as they requested so that they could "push" the domain into namescout but that nothing had happened, a day later. And that there was no formal record of my ownership with WHOIS or with namescout.com Also, I had not been familiar with namescout and was upset that they (the domain reseller) had never mentioned anything in advance about forcing me to use namescout. THey had never told me in advance that after the purchase of the domain name, I would be forced to deal with namsescout.com. Bad enough that I had to make multiple phone calls to even find out that I was supposed to open up an account with namescout. There was no mention of the process in the emails confirming my payment. My preferred registrar is GoDaddy and the customer service rep could not give me a valid reason as to why they insisted on "pushing" my domain into namescout and not allowing me to choose the registrar of my choice. What if I had never called to ask about the status of the domain name? Would it be sitting in limbo? would they ever tell me to open an account in namescout? The ordeal took hours of phone calls, emails, etc. and still wasn't resolved. the customer rep. only began responding to me when I was very firm and aggressive calling them on their bullshit. She responded with a million excuses and asked me to wait patiently. She told me that the name hadn't been pushed into my account in namescout the previous day, because of technical reasons beyond their control, etc. She was full of bullshit excuses in response to all of my concerns. TO make a long story short, the domain name finally showed up (long after promised) in the domain manager section of my namescout.com online account. BUT, here's the catch...because of what Namescout.com claims is a "known issue" and a technical problem, they are not able to change the name of the owner/registrant of this domain from the old owner's name, to my name. My name appears in the billing/administrative/technical contact fields of WHOIS, but NOT in the Owner/Registrant field. This is the email namescout sent me: "I am sending this email as requested to confirm in writing that there is an issue affecting your ability to change the owner / registrant contact on (domain name). We do sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that is being caused.We discovered the issue while I was walking (me) through the process of switching the contact details for (domain name). We successfully changed the administrative, technical, and billing contacts for (domain name) so they now all display your details, but whenever we attempted to change the owner / registrant contact our system kept switching the contact back to the old details....Regards,Pool.com Customer Service" I don't know who "pool.com" is. And why namescout would reply to an email as "pool.com" the customer service rep told me that the re-seller I bought the domain name from has some kind of affiliation with pool.com or something, but because they are limited in someway, namescout/pool acts as the registrar for them. Namescout claims they are working on the technical issue. And as of today, the domain name still appears to be up for sale on the original reseller's site that I bought it from and the old owner's name still appears on WHOIS as the owner/registrant. Have I been totally scammed? Am I the victim of cyber crime? Or are the domain re-seller and namescout.com totally incompetant? It seems like I am not really the owner. Doesn't it seem like a terrible unbelievable excuse on namescout's part that they are not able to modify the registrant/owner info. in WHOIS to list me as the owner?
Sounds like you've been scammed pretty good. Emails like the original one you got seem fishy to me to begin with.
yes it is a scam, we get around 5 emails per week telling us an organisation wants to use our trademark as their domain and for us to stop them we HAVE to buy the domains, I just pass it tot he legal department who tell them we will sue them if they register it due to IP infringement.
There are lots of emails like this and I got them everyday. You will know if you really have done something but if none better just ignore it.