Are you the proud owner of your own website, meaning you own some virtual real estate on the Internet, including a domain name. Perhaps you have noticed the trickery of the Domain Name Registration companies, which use your credit card number at will to renew the domain name sometimes up to two months in advance. Obviously you are being cheated as the domain name is not due yet, but they have your money in advance.

This is not a new trick in business to cheat you out of your money, as it is the same trick that magazines do with their subscriptions. The best way to stop this from happening to you is to never give them permission to use your credit card to renew your domain name, even if they use scare tactics to tell you, that by giving them your renewal permission you will be sure not to lose your domain, website and the many hours you have invested in it.

If you do not allow automatic renewal the company will send you email notices of reminder. But be sure these renewal notices come from the actual company, as this is a way people will cheat you and use phishing scams. It would be nice if the FTC would take care of this scam, but let’s face it the FTC is as impotent as the Viagra Spam you get in your email box. The fact is the FTC is inept to scam and SPAM; you must protect yourself.

Most legitimate domain name registration companies will email you reminding you to renew anyway and often two-three months in advance, do not email that far in advance as many times you lose the remainder of the time left. It is amazing that you have to keep paying to keep your domain name, seems like once you buy it you should own it for as long as your site is up and running. What a scam that is? But this is typical, you see most all monopolies are created by the government; this is no exception, as the domain name registration started out as a monopoly thanks to the government. Now that scammers are using it to phish you must watch your credit card number like a hawk. The companies themselves are cheating their consumers; you are forced to watch out for yourself. So, do not give the companies permission to automatically renew, they are abusing that privledge and do not renew too soon before the date of expiration and call your Congress Person as domain names should not expire if you are using them. Think about this.

"Lance Winslow" - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

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