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No More WHOIS scams?
scholztec writes "It seems it's no longer necessary to have your personal information flapping in the breeze. Domains by Proxy
will allow your private information to remain private. It's owned by the same people as Go Daddy Software. Basically, they provide a
proxy ownership service, which means that their info goes in the WHOIS, but you still retain full rights to your domain.
Of course, some people may miss the domain telemarketers, or those lovely
renewal scam notices from VeriSign and Domain registry of America. Check out articles at: The Register,
UDRPlaw, and Domain Name Essentials;
or Go
Daddy's press release (PDF format)."
Users of the service can have email sent to the address in the Whois forwarded to them, and can even have DBP act as a snail-mail proxy, for an additional fee. Parsons said the company has patents pending on the technology behind the service.
What technology would that be? The e-mail forwarding? The snail mail forwarding? E-mail forwarding of course is already done and any smart person would know not to put their everyday e-mail in the whois database. As for snail mail forwarding, places like Mailboxes etc have done that for years.
Another thing about this is the question of ownership. By not entering your own information into the database, they are legally the owners which means that you are at their mercy. Yes, of course they say they are just acting as your proxy but what happens if they go under? What happens if one day they decide that they'd like to keep your high traffic domain name for themselves?
There are private domains already. .CX is for the country Christmas Island. They do not give out private info on anyone. Their privacy policy is pretty good and is here.
.CX domains. To register one you go to www.netdns.cx and spend $37 for the first year. Then you spend $37 for every two years after that.
.cx then that stupid goat guy. www.oralse.cx is one of the funniest sites around.
.COM proxy... because with the proxy ownership you don't really own the stinking domain! What happens if your site gets HUGE and they threaten you to start paying more or they take away your domain. :(
I love my
And yes, more website use
I haven't got any spam ever for the domains that I registered. This is better then the
While it doesn't cut down on my postal direct mail marketing, I have found one way to cut the WHOIS-related telemarketing down to almost nil. I used my cell phone number on the contact info.
At first thought, this might seem like a crazy idea, but it really works. In the US, it is illegal for telemarketers to call your cell phone number to solicit services, or to use a war-dialer on cell phone exchanges to fill their call lists.
On the rare occasions that I have received a telemarketing call, I have simply informed the caller that they were calling a cell phone, that it was illegal, and that if they called again within a one year period I would have legal right to take them to small claims court for a settlement of $500 per offense. I haven't gotten a telemarketing call from the same company twice.
Since I switched my WHOIS record info from my business number to my cell number, I've seen my telemarketing calls drop by well over 99%.