Company Tries To Sell Me A Pending Delete!
January 20, 7 Comments - Author: Simon JohnsonIts no secret that I buy domains / portfolios and own quite a few in the finance / mortgage vertical. As such, its typical for my mailbox to contain a few emails each day, from people approaching me directly.
When I looked closely at this recent email, there are a few issues that concern me. For the benefit of the community, I’ve decided to repost the entire message below.
Its clear from the whois record, that the domain name they are trying to sell me is in “Pending Delete” status. An interesting (some would say ethically challenging) business model.
For those newbies reading this, “Pending Delete” means they don’t own the domain, its about to expire (in less than 5 days) and you have about the same chance of catching it as they do. For the record, InTrust have a Better Business Bureau record!
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Priority Domain Availability Notice for refinance-my-mortgage.com:
In the next few days, refinance-my-mortgage.com will be listed for sale. Since you have a similar domain name, we thought you might be interested in acquiring refinance-my-mortgage.com.
You can confirm your interest in the domain refinance-my-mortgage.com by filling out the form here: http://initrustdomainservices.biz/store/prioritynotice/SNIP
After we receive a confirmation that you are interested in the domain refinance-my-mortgage.com, our sales staff will be in touch with you promptly to make arrangements.
We look forward to hearing back from you.
Kind regards,
John Timmers
InTrust Domains
11590 Black Forest Road
Colorado Springs, CO 80908-6000
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Facebook comments:
There basically pre-qualifying expiring domains to see which ones they can flip and then only purchase the domains that received interest. It’s sort of a gray area in my opinion and would never work on a domain investor like yourself. The emails might be considered SPAM as well.
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Hmm…
It’s a Privacy protected domain.
Could the domain, now in pending delete, have been owned by InTrust Domains, who may be making a last-ditch attempt to sell before the domain goes to auction?
I’m not clear if the company can still retrieve the domain (at a penalty) during the 5-day pending delete stage.
But if the company is just hoping to catch it and then sell it to you, then that’s pretty strange and a lot icky.
I once had someone who tried to sell me a domain (for over $500.00) that was available for hand reg (which I did). I thought about thanking him, but decided that if he wanted to act a free go-between, then I was cool with that.
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Good heads up … I get emails from that same company from time-to-time. Since they gave me notice that the DotCom name version of my name was coming up – I had the DotNet (thanks InTrust!), I was able to catch the name as it dropped! But I agree … that practice do seem to be a bit unethical.
I love these sort of emails as I have captured some nice .COMs reg fee due to the alerts. One would think they would check to see if you are a small business with fewer than ten domains. Any registrant with hundreds of domains is likely a domainer.
Leonard is right. I’ve received quite a few of these emails myself recently and I was able to buy 3 interesting domains for the reg fee as soon as they were deleted. Thanks John Timmers
I’ve been getting this e-mail as well for a domain where I own the .info version. I should thank them for the reminder about watching the domain. But I would never let them buy it for me instead of going after it myself. I can see how this would easily “fool” someone who don’t even know the word domaining!
I’ve got the same mail, offering me the .com where I own the .net, just to bother, I asked for info. The price depends on how much times per seccond they will try to register it, after expiration.