All:

I wanted to post a general alert about Domain Registry of America. I believe they are engaging in a practice that borders on illegal in the worse case scenario and is clearly unethical in the best case scenario.

They are combing the public registries and sending letters to people telling them that their domain names will be expiring and to renew it simply fill out the enclosed form with payment and they will renew it. Near as I can tell when you do this your domain name will be ripped away from it current registrar to this company. This echoes the scams phone companies used to do called "slamming" back in late 90's where they would call you and try and confuse you into simply agreeing with them on the phone or filling out some dubious looking letter that would switch your phone service.

For those of us who know what we are doing we probably wouldn't fall for this ruse, but be careful with your clients who may be getting these letters, but you manage the domain for them. One of my clients got this and almost filled it out because he thought he had to. Luckily he called me first and I was able to intervene before that happened and assured him his domain was still registered and was not expired or even scheduled to expire anytime soon.

If you actually read the entire letter it doesn't actually say anything illegal or wrong, but clearly it is designed to fool people who are not very knowledgeable or don't know better. The form looks like a bill and lists the person's domain name(s) and tells them to protect their name and keep it from expiring to fill out the form and send payment. Once a person does that this company will become the new registrar and who knows what will get screwed up in the transfer process. The DNS might get changed and that could pull a huge eCommerce web site offline for several days or something along those lines and cost you (or your client) a bunch of cash.