Is this scam still around? Wow
Works the same way as it has for the last couple years, they just keep changing a few details. I, and others, have written lots here about it... pretty simple process:
1. they email that they're interested in your name and ask you your selling price.
2. they reply OK to any amount you tell them.
3. they say that you must get a professional, personal appraisal for your name to prove its value.
4. they refer you to a url that takes you to what looks to be a forum discussing domain appraisers. **it is a FAKE forum page that they faked to look real**.
5. on that fake forum page, people seem to be 'bashing' other appraisers, but saying that one is very good. The one they say is good keeps changing name, as too many people catch on to one set of names they create a new set. It used to be allfordomains.com, now I see they're using domainsecondhand.com. Ha.
6. you go to that site, pay a huge whack of cash for a 'personal' appraisal... which actually looks suspiciously like all the auto appraisals you can get anywhere else, ha.
7. you supply this to the 'buyer', who then mysteriously loses interest in your name, comes up with an excuse that he's found a better name, or just ignores you and you never hear from them again. They've made their money on the scam appraisal, so they no longer need to pretend interest
If you look at
www.domainsecondhand.com, and then go
www.allfordomains.com, you'll see they are exactly the same. Layout, info, everything.
I could say a lot more, but it gets tiring re-hashing it about these geekeroonies. About 2 years ago my domaining pard got taken in for this scam. Then the next time it happened, we had some fun with it, played it right through (without doing the appraisal of course, just lots of talk back and forth), then started to pretend to act suspicious, then started to research whatever we could on them - ip address, where they're from, the names and businesses they used, etc... then we got really serious and said we were notifying the FBI, that this was a huge fraud and they were committing a serious crime, that we tracked down the names of people they were impersonating, called the companies whose names they were using so they could take them to court, etc, etc, really went to town telling them the 'steps we took each day', and they were literally SCREAMING at us over the emails by the time we got tired of it. They were swearing, threatening us in bad English (they - or some of them - are foreign), sometimes being apologetic and defensive.
Anyway, boy these guys get tiring. And they're still making a lot of money obvously, no one's shut them down yet and there are so many newbie domainers every day for them to victimize...
