Don’t Pay Invoices By Suspicious Scam Companies!

Because of quite a few of our clients asking about invoices or renewal notifications from suspicious domain and business registration companies, we would like to issue the following warning:

Do not pay invoices from any company that you do not know for any services regarding web hosting, domain registration, SSL certificate renewals or business name registration renewals!

Companies such as Registration Pty Ltd, Domain Name Group or SSL Trust prey on businesses that want to do the right thing by paying due invoices. They use scare tactics such as warnings of downtime of your website or other online service interruptions to create a sense of urgency.

These companies send out unsolicited invoices or offers that intentionally appear like invoices often for domain name variations of your actual domain such as .net.au when your company domain is a .com.au domain.

The invoice amounts are in many cases outrageous such as $245/year for a service that is worth about $29/year.

Regarding SSL certificate renewals these suspicious scam companies often mention the expiry date of your certificate which is information that is publicly available to appear as the legitimate provider of your current SSL certificate.

For our Website Management Plan customers: Domain Registration, Web Hosting & SSL Certificate Renewals are covered by your plan. We take care of all renewals long before they are due to ensure that no service interruptions will occur.

If you are using services from providers other than F1RST such as your IT service provider, another Web Hosting Company, Domain Registration Service or SSL Certificate Issuing Authority: Please make sure you and your staff know who they are and you will be able to identify actual or suspicious invoices.

You can also do some investigating yourself by entering parts of the written content of your invoice or renewal notice into a search engine such as Google. Often you will be able to find similar or identical wording on websites specialising in fraud reporting.

If you are a F1RST client and are in doubt about invoices or renewal notices from suspicious scam companies, please feel free to forward the emails, letters or faxes to us to double-check. We are happy to assist.