I received an odd renewal notice today from a company I didn’t recognize. I looked to see if it was still in my account, which it was, and found the e-mail to be entirely fraudulent. This would be particularly dangerous for naive domain owners who take these kinds of e-mail at face value. The website is hosted at a Russian webhosting company, and the domain are registered in Latvia. The e-mail and whois records are below.
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One of the differences between domain investing and domain speculation is the annual game we play deciding which domains to keep, and which to drop. Domain investors should be investing in high-quality assets that have the highest long-term growth potential, and thus should have very few renew-or-drop decisions.
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One of the curses of using SnapNames is receiving domains at a large number of different registrars. And one of my big challenges is transferring those domains to a preferred registrar. I let one of my favorite domains expire by mistake, AmericanSoulmates.com, and was forced to fill out a paper form and pay a ransom of US$155 to have it reinstated.

I’ve experienced the “redeem” functionality of a number of registrars, each with their own quirks. However, Melbourne IT definitely is the quirkiest.