Possible Scam Alert

The office manager at BOB got an email requesting us to update our DNS information. This isn’t really my main line of work but when I got around to it I looked carefully and the domains involved didn’t seem to correspond to our webhost or the people we have buildingopportunities.org registered with.

The email claims to be from support@netnation.com but the link uses a domain www.domainpeople.com. The WHOIS results from that website differ from the command line on my Mac. This started me thinking it might be a scam. So I Google NetNation. Turns out they own a bunch of other companies but are headquartered just up the street from us, so I call their number, get tech support and they don’t have any record of emailing us and I don’t even think they have anything to do directly with our website.

I then dug a little deeper into the email that was forwarded to me and found the domain affinitycreativeteam.com which surprise is headquartered in Coconut Creek Florida according to their DNS entry. This domain doesn’t load but their contact is Affinity Marketing Dept. so I decided since NetNation didn’t seem too interested in possibly being used to phish people, I’d write a little blog posting, to get the story out there. It says to contact: dcartin@affinity.com about this domain and perhaps someone will want to in the near future. Gate.com also out of Florida is involved in someway.

Be warned if you get an email like this one:

WHOIS DATA REMINDER POLICY
The following is an important account notification sent in accordance with our Service Agreement.
Dear Customer, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the non-profit corporation responsible for accrediting domain name registration providers. ICANN requires domain name registration customers to keep their WHOIS contact information current. ICANN mandates that outdated contact information can be grounds for domain name cancellation. To comply with this requirement, we periodically request that customers verify, and if necessary, update their account records. Click on the link(s) listed below, under the heading “Domain Name(s)”. Your WHOIS contact information should be displayed in your web browser if not, please copy and paste the link directly in your browser. If the WHOIS contact information listed for the domain is incorrect or if you have Whois Protector Services enabled please log into your customer control panel to make any necessary adjustments.
Domain Name(s)

Affinity is also owned by Hostway which ties them all together, possibly with DomainScout and our actual DNS provider. I went through this big headache of having to phone Barbados only to get back to Canada, but NameScout doesn’t appear to be a Hostway company so why are we getting this email. It is either a mistake or some attempt to get us to switch, or a phishing scam. Either way it was a waste of time.

I called our DNS provider Internic.ca and they believe that since NetNation claims no knowledge of this I should call ICANN directly and that my intuition was correct and it is a scam, but I’m still not sure to what end. All it accomplished was wasting people’s time.

To start 2019 I overhauled my blog and edited and removed a bunch of posts. I had forgotten about this episode. This was actually work related but I’ve encountered a lot of difficulties maintaining this blog including lots of problems with spammers, scammers, and script kiddies. If you have encountered this or a similar scheme you can leave a comment below.

This entry was originaly posted on March 25th, 2009, it was last edited on March 19th, 2019 and is filed under: Technology and tagged: DNS, Phishing, Scam.