Domain Name Appraisal Scams

Domain Name Appraisal Scams

Here’s a new one on me. The Domain Name Appraisal Scam. The email is simple, some emails you asking to buy your domain name for 65% of it’s appraised value. They include links to three different “appraisal services,” one of which is a scam site. The scam site is of course the cheapest of them all.

What is not quite clear in this scam is if they’re also stealing credit card info, or just trying to get people to pay for a bogus appraisal.

From: jeffmiller44@gmail.com

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are interested to buy your domain name BBXGAME.COM and offer to buy it from you for 65% of the appraised market value.

As of now we accept appraisals from either one of the following leading appraisal companies:

sedo.com
flyappraisals.com
accuratedomains.com

If you already have an appraisal please forward it to us.

As soon as we have received your appraisal we will send you our payment (we use Paypal for amounts less than $2,000 and escrow.com for amounts above $2,000) as well as further instructions on how to complete the transfer of the domain name.

We appreciate your business,

Yours truly,

Jeff Miller

In this case the fake Domain Name Appraisal company is flyappraisals.com. Others have reported the fake appraisal company being nameorange.com and namepros.com

On a side note and out of curiosity I did a Google Search for Free Domain Name Appraisals and came up with these:
Swiftappraisal.com
LeapFish.com
DNScoop.com

BBXGame.com appraises for $1600-$2400, $25, and $506 in that order. Which goes to show that the art of Domain Name Appraisals is black at best.

13 thoughts on “Domain Name Appraisal Scams

  1. Randy Reply

    I received the above e-mail today – word for word except for my domain name. flyappraisals.com seems on the surface to be a central Florida real estate appraisal service. Hope nobody gets taken by this. Then I googled the e-mail address and found this site.

  2. anonymous Reply

    I just received the same message today (with flyappraisals.com). Thank you for posting this.

    BTW: your tabindex on the comment form input boxes is off. When tabbing from the Name field it goes up to the search field, then back down to the email, website and comment fields.

    • Rick Reply

      Thank you for the info, I'll look into fixing that, although I'm seriously considering a theme change anyways. 🙂

  3. Broccx Reply

    I got the same email. as always, I google anything before trying it out, just to see what people have to say about it. I don't quite understand how this scam works yet but, it may be a sibling of the same old check/money order scam.

  4. Justin Reply

    Rick, just had the same scam hit my inbox and it is very unique and very clever! The only reason it flagged as suspicious to me was because the domain they wanted to 'buy' was in fact expired anyway.

  5. Honeycut Reply

    I just got the same email, for a domain of mine. I googled the sender's email address and ended up here.

    Loves me a good scam.

  6. Ian Reply

    Ah, I thought there was something scammy going on – the email was interested in a 'firstword-secondword.com' style domain, yet firstwordsecondword.com was unregistered.

    Who would offer to buy the hyphenated name before registering the unhyphenated one?

    I was wondering if it was the registrar I'd used for the domain trying to get me to buy the other one quick!

  7. James Reply

    This scam only makes sense if one of these 3 companies are doing it:

    sedo.com
    flyappraisals.com
    accuratedomains.com

    And sedo.com are bound to be getting the lions share of the appraisals being the first and most recognizable name in the list.

    I'm the mug who just paid 25 quid to sedo for a domain appraisal… (although sedo valued my domain at 1700 Euros – so at least it's put a smile on my face)

    • Rick Reply

      The point is that flyappraisals.com is the cheapest of the appraisers, so they're possibly getting some suckers.

  8. ZARDOZ Reply

    Gee, Just got first one too! Idiots!
    __________________________
    From: markevans02@gmail.com

    We are interested to buy your domain name DBSWEBHOST.COM and offer to buy it from you for 80% of the appraised market value.

    As of now we accept appraisals from either one of the following leading appraisal companies:

    – fleos.com
    – sedo.com

    If you already have an appraisal please forward it to us.

    As soon as we have received your appraisal we will send you our payment (we use paypal for amounts less than $2,000 and escrow for amounts above $2,000) as well as
    further instructions on how to complete the transfer of the domain name.

    We appreciate your business,

    Yours truly,

    Mark Evans

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