Domain scam?
 

Never seen this one before, anyone have any thoughts?
I dropped about a dozen domains yesterday so they're on hold with the registrar, got two separate emails today, each one about one of the domains.
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Dear owner of xxxxxxxx.net,

I have noticed that your domain "xxxxxxxxx.net" is not active and is in REGISTRAR-HOLD status, which means that it is going to be publicly available soon. I'd like to buy this domain name before it gets expired. I assume, you are not interested in keeping it for yourself.

I can buy this domain for $60 plus any renewal related expenses. What do you think?
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can anyone shed any light on this - ever seen one like this before?

I have sent mails similar to people hoping to snag the domain before it drops, so I guess it could be legit.
It's amazing what people wouldn't buy in/on a forum, regular auction, etc., but when it drops it seems those 'useless' domains can go for quite a bit.

50/50 chance its legit

yeah makes sense, but my antenna are up because these are crappy domains lol

Probably a domainer hunting domains before they have to compete for them.

One man's trash is another man's treasure. :2 cents:

I guess it is possible that it is a form letter that is script generated. kind of like services that know when anyone refi's their house.

Never received one of those but it could be legit. Write back and tell them you received the exact same offer but for $100. See what kind of response they give you.

And they tell him forget it? Then he is out the $60 they offered.

hmmm....not sure naked-older-women.com is worth haggling over when i was going to drop it anyway ;-)

could be, but i dropped about a dozen and only got the letter for two of them.

So you guarantee him this is not a scam. The more communication the better feeling you get about a stranger. What's wrong with dealing anyways? $60 bucks is crap minus first years registration especially if the deal doesn't go through.:2 cents:

Did you read what Mike said?


Sounds like $60 is a nice surprise.

And the thread title is 'DOMAIN SCAM?'...

He also said they are crappy domains. If only life were so cut & dry Baddog we would all be billionaires.

damn, never would have thought to look, the content on that site had been down since the 2257 rewrite first broke, two years ago lol

what he said

yeah, that's what i would have thought if they weren't hyphenated domains with just FPAs on them and almost no SE traffic - like i said, i never thought to look further into backlinks, etc, since there's been no real content on them for two years so the idea of a domainer wanting them seemed odd to me at the time.

yah scammmm

If the domain is already on hold, what exactly is there to get scammed out of?

just the renewal fee - i'm not worried about losing my life savings over this lol, it just made me very curious...

sounds like a good legit deal

OK, anyone have any thoughts on this now?
To recap, here's the email i got yesterday:
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Dear owner of xxxxxxxx.net,

I have noticed that your domain "xxxxxxxxx.net" is not active and is in REGISTRAR-HOLD status, which means that it is going to be publicly available soon. I'd like to buy this domain name before it gets expired. I assume, you are not interested in keeping it for yourself.

I can buy this domain for $60 plus any renewal related expenses. What do you think?
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I responded and got no answer back.
Today, I got a new email, from a DIFFERENT person at a DIFFERENT email address:
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Dear owner of xxxxxxxx.net,

I have noticed that your domain "xxxxxxxxx.net" is not active and is in REGISTRAR-HOLD status, which means that it is going to be publicly available soon. I'd like to buy this domain name before it gets expired. I assume, you are not interested in keeping it for yourself.

I can buy this domain for $50 plus any renewal related expenses. What do you think?
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Could this be a form email from some domain pickup service or something?

I've always been scared to send an email like that because I don't want to remind the owner to renew just in case he forgot.

Your domain naked-older-women.com is listed on Dmoz, and therefore worth money for Domain/SEO people. It looks legit for me.


http://directory.google.com/Top/Adul...ftcore/Free/N/


These people have scripts that automatically email any yahoo/dmoz listed domain that is being deleted. They hope the owner will sell it to them, so they don't have to auction against other people on expired domain actions, because there these go for way more $.

could be legit, but could also be a scam

yea, no kidding, heh

yep, as i mentioned, i hadn't even bothered to check the backlinks on the ones i decided to let go because they'd been nothing but fpas for the last two years, so i understood why those were singled out - i was just trying to understand the exact same emails, letter for letter and punctuation for punctuation, from two (apparently) different people.

but i heard back from the second guy - apparently they're using the same software that automatically generates the default email written by the original programmer ;-)

thanks everyone :-)