this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 125 points 8 months ago (1 children)

We got a "bill" from a company like this that wanted ~300 bucks to "list your companies name on our website". That was it. You paid them, and you got added to the list of accountants that didn't read the fine print. Pretty clever, if obnoxious.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

This is common with domain registrations too. They will mail an unsuspecting company a request to pay for “continued domain protection” for a domain close to expiration, which means literally paying them to send another letter when the domain is up for renewal again. The don’t do anything with the domain, you just pay them to mail you letters when it’s close to expiring

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I got those letters when I registered a domain. It was so annoying.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Nowadays any registrar worth their salt will provide free Whois protection for TLDs that support it, but it was absolutely a racket at the time

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This is genius, I should automate it

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

The whois data is usually anonymized these days. However, there are companies that forget to check that box.

Spammers often deliberately make their messages full of spelling and grammatical errors because they want to target people who are just that naive. Might have a similar thing going on here.