They sent a congratulatory email saying I won the auction and that I should click on the website of the domain and that if I see an order form, I can place the payment online or call them. Well, guess what…all that’s there was a “page does not exist” warning. I called them out of curiosity and their phone number in Colorado picks up immediately with an automatic greeting that start halfway into the recorded greeting. Unprofessional and fishy.

I looked up the domain on WHOIS and found that it’s actually for sale for “$69″ and found the following information:

Date Registered: 03/26/11
Date Modified: 03/28/11
Expiry Date: 03/26/13
DNS1: FOR-SALE-AT.INTRUSTDOMAINS.COM
DNS2: CALL.303-800-0310.COM

Registrant
Mark Peters
Wesley Hayes
Hollandse kade 7a
Abcoude, (NL)
1391 JD

Administrative Contact
Rose McCaige
11605 Meridian Market View #124-134
Falcon, CO (US)
80831
303-800-0310

So if won the auction on 3/27/11, why was it registered a day earlier for two years? Does that strike anyone else as suspicious?

I also got two calls today from “Mark” at Intrust Domains who basically encouraged me very kindly to “pay now” on his voice mail message to me.

One thing that should be glaringly obvious to everyone is the rather cheesy setup for their site and rather unprofessional emails. The site is clearly set up by someone who knows basic HTML and nothing else, using “Free Use” photos that make them look really pathetic. Compare them to WHOIS, Godaddy or any other notable domain registry and they look both incompetent and pathetic.

After reading about their scams and weird business operation…and the fact that it’s hard to pin them to any specific country in which they operate, then anyone getting duped by them at this point deserves to lose their money…no offense to anyone who got fooled by them earlier.

There are too many obvious signs that they’re a scam company, and far too many posts about them online to complain that there was no way to know.

If you want to back-order a domain, do it through a legitimate site that has a strong presence and reputation. Would you buy a car from Earl the Car Guy? Hell no. Why would you buy from “InTrust Domains”? As someone said earlier, don’t trust anyone who immediately tells you to trust them.

Oh, last note…what kind of idiotic organization sends an email saying, “To check our business references, please refer to the Better Business Bureau.” That implies you don’t have much credibility in the first place.

I didn’t respond, but after that, the race was on – I backordered on GoDaddy and lost, and end up paying Intrust $397 for the domain.

It was probably my backorder request that made them buy it. But in the end it was worth the $397 to me to have been notified when the domain became available and secure it, with very little effort on my part. Sure, I could have feigned indifference for another year waiting for it to come up again, but that would have been too much effort.

So, for me they were a service provider and I give them some credit for their business model. Also, as Max stated, if they truly will give back a domain that someone forgot to renew (hmm), then they take some of the www (wild wild west) out of the process.

The complaints I’m reading here so far unfortunately is siding towards the cons of dropcatching companies, more so on post-sales (my post most probably enforced those comments coming). More often than not the customer support are appalling, therefore putting the legitimacy of this practice increasingly questionable.

I’m keeping this comment thread open… who knows, maybe something good may come out of it, or at least more that than bad.

Go see your grandmother and explain to her what you do for a living. Tell her you prey on small business owners who are so busy running their business that they forget to renew their domain. Tell her that once the small business owner has made that mistake you send them deceptive emails, trying to sucker as much money out of them as you can.
Then ask your grandmother if she thinks the “most nasty” part of your business is “spam-like emails”.

And as your grandmother gets on in years, and someone rings her doorbell and convinces her to sign away her home and her assets, I hope you will applaud that swindler’s “entrepreneurial spirit”. After all, they are only making a living the same way you do.

As I said, it the case of http://www.loveshade.com, the price went to $500, then when our http://www.loveshade.org site became one of the one percent most visited sites on the Internet, the opening bid, not sales price, for the dot com domain went up to $1200.

But I do have to amend my comments. We got the domain name with a little help from our friends….

In addition, as I posted earlier, in our case the ‘helpful person’ claimed to be with a company that did not fit their email and website, which is why I reported it to the real company.

The fact you’ve grabbed that domain is because no one else wanted it, which is usually not the case. When some other company like, say , GoDaddy wants it, you can be sure that you won’t get it for 10$ . GoDaddy tries to grab good expiring domain names using around 200 domain registrars it owns, with god knows how many servers,

So, yeah, if your domain name is really not that interesting ( in the SEO sense, if it doesn’t contains good search keywords ), there are good chances that you’ll be able to get those domains yourself . But, there are more and more domain squatters who will be more than happy to take .com version of your domain only in order to park them on some ad-service, and to divert the traffic from your site, only to earn few cents a day.

Then InTrust allowed the domain name to expire. I set up my GoDaddy account to catch it when it dropped. While it was in the deletion process, and especially during pending delete status, I got several emails from their system notifying me it would soon be available and offering it to me. I got these because I still owned the domain name in TLDs other than .com. I did not reply to these emails and instead complained about them through SpamCop. When the domain name dropped GoDaddy caught it for me.

“…people just don’t get how complex this stuff is, thinking they can do it themselves.” Hmm. And here I thought we did it ourselves and it was very simple. Obviously, we was wrong.

1. we find good domain names that are about to expire
2. we find people who may be interested in buying this domain and contact them offering our services
3. we try to drop-catch this domain. This is not trivial task, since there are several players, like intrust, who will try to do the same (we have monster-servers with crazy connection speed and we know exact time when the domain will be released)
4. we sell the domain to the new owner.

If someone refuses to buy the domain we just put banners there.

So the most “nasty” part of our business is “spam-like” emails, but in most cases recipient is interested, he just don’t agree with the price.

We tried different kind of emails, saying like “we don’t hold this domain yet but we can acquire it for you at day X”. This had almost zero response, people just don’t get how complex this stuff is, thinking they can do it themselves.

All this stuff is automated, so this is a very little chance to have a happy ending like author of the post had.

Primary domain marked is dead.