New Domain Appraisal Scam

[Ankesh]

I received an email today:

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Dear Sir or Madam,

We are interested to buy your domain name A-DOMAIN-I-OWN.COM and offer to buy it from you for 65% of the appraised market value.

As of now we accept appraisals from either one of the following leading appraisal companies:

sedo.com
nameorange.com
accuratedomains.com


If you already have an appraisal please forward it to us.

As soon as we have received your appraisal we will send you our payment (we use Paypal for amounts less than $2,000 and escrow.com for amounts above $2,000) as well as further instructions on how to complete the transfer of the domain name.

We appreciate your business,

Yours truly,

Charles Johnson

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I used to do quite a bit of buying and selling of domain names some time back. So this email intrigued me.

I replied to the buyer to send me his best offer without the appraisal.

But then did further checking via google - and found that its a scam by nameorange.com - who is the cheapest domain appraiser out of the 3 options.

So...

1. Beware of the new domain appraisal scam if you receive such an email
2. Read the email. It teaches some good persuasion lessons.

The domain name appraisal scam — which was reborn with a different tact last month — has changed its target domain name appraisal service. A new scam email requests a domain name appraisal from TropicalNames.com. TopicalNames.com was just registered on April 2.

Last month’s e-mails tried to get users to pay for domain name appraisals at a bogus outfit called Pozde.com.

The emails offer three different services to choose from; two of which are legitimate. But the scam offers a third service that is cheaper than the others. I know that some people were taken in by the scam last time, coughing up $22.95 for an appraisal from Pozde.com.

Here’s the full text of the email:

I am interested to buy your domain name domain.COM and offer to buy it from you for 65% of the appraised market value.

As of now I accept appraisals from either one of the following leading appraisal companies:

sed o.com
tropicalnames.com
accuratedomains.com

If you already have an appraisal please forward it to me.

As soon as I have received your appraisal I will send you my payment (I use Paypal for amounts less than $2,000 and escrow.com for amounts above $2,000) as well as further instructions on how to complete the transfer of the domain name.

I appreciate your business,

So how does this scam work?

I'm assuming, me, as the sucker, would go to the cheapest appraiser and pay for an appraisal of my site.

Then, the offer of 65% of appraised value would disappear?

So this con game is designed to beat me out of $22.95?

I would never suspect anything. Thanks for the heads-up!