Updated: February 04th, 2021
Have you received an email recently, from Dave Lee or William Miller at DNS Australia (dnsaustralia.org), warning you that Your domain name has been claimed?
Don’t Worry –
1. You’re not the only one, and
2. It’s a SCAM!
Everyone that owns a domain name will get an email like this at some point; we got one this week, and so did several of our clients.
They’re not new and technically they’re not doing anything particularly heinous; aside from sending you unsolicited SPAM email.
They are, however, preying on the ignorance and hence vulnerability of some domain name owners, creating fear in the hope of selling them stuff they don’t need.
Illegal? Maybe.
Immoral, Misleading & Fraudulent? Well it doesn’t sit well with us. Let’s take a closer look.
Companies like this often target legitimate owners of domain names, such as yourdomain.com.au and lead you to believe that applications to register variations of your domain name have been made by other parties.
This is misleading and fraudulent!
These domains could include –
- yourdomain.com
- yourdomain.net
- yourdomain.org
- yourdomain.biz
- yourdomain.info
The implication being that once another party owns one of these variations that they will somehow compromise your legitimate website and/or business.
This fear-mongering is completely unfounded!
One of our clients already owned the registration for the domain this company was trying to sell them…
If it makes you feel better, you could always go through your own domain registrar and register them yourself; generally at much better pricing than is being offered by these opportunistic scammers.
Good Rule of Thumb
We always recommend to clients, looking to take their business online, that they register the Top Level Domain (TLD) .com and the Country Code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) for Australia, .com.au as a minimum.
Then point both domains to the same website…
To be eligible to register a .com.au domain name, registrants must be at least one of the following:
- An Australian registered company (ACN)
- Trading under a registered business name in any Australian State or Territory (ABN)
- An Australian partnership or sole trader
- A foreign company licensed to trade in Australia
- An owner of an Australian Registered Trade Mark
- An applicant for an Australian Registered Trade Mark
- An association incorporated in any Australian State or Territory
- An Australian commercial statutory body.
This eligibility builds trust within the Australian market; users know they are visiting the site of a recognised local business.
Also, search Engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo recognise the geographical location of internet searches, and if the searcher is located in Australia, then Australian businesses are deemed to be more relevant and will rank higher in search engine results pages (SERP’s) than their global .com counterparts. This is a significant advantage to helping your website appear on the front page of search engines.
Having the .com (TLD) also, will help your website attract international visitors.
Two Other Good Rules of Thumb
- Keep your domains registered with the same registrar. We recommend Go Daddy as they don’t charge extra fees to use their domain tools; unlike others we won’t name!
- Keep your Domain Registrar separate from your Hosting Company. We recommend Siteground for overall performance, customer service and value for money.
So back to our Spammers / Scammers:
• dnsaustralia.org is registered to a company in the Netherlands
• They claim to reside at 15 Moore St, Canberra, ACT. Which is actually the ANZ House multi-storey office building
• There’s no phone number listed to contact anyone there and emails sent to info@dnsaustralia.org have so far gone unanswered.
The best thing to do with these emails is –
BLOCK & DELETE!
NOTE: DNSAustralia.org is not to be confused with DNSAustralia.net.au
- Need some help?
- Concerned that you may be the target of a scam?
- Like some further information on how to protect your online interests?
Just drop us a line.