Internet Register Ireland Scam Warning

Mikael passed this across my desk this morning and its a really good attempt at a scam. A brief check at Michele's site reveals he's already gotten five of the notices! There is a thread on the Irish webmaster's forum.

The major issue with this letter is in the fine print at the bottom. Signing and returning the letter is agreeing to pay these chancers the sum of €958 for a "listing" in their "directory". The advice from all is to bin the letter and ignore this scam.

The IEDR have already sent out a warning stating that:

It has recently come to the attention of the IEDR that a company operating under the name “Internet Register Ireland” is in the process of contacting businesses with registered .ie domain names by post and by fax, soliciting them to register their domain name with the “Internet Register Ireland”. The “Internet Register Ireland”, a German based company will request you to fill out their form and return it to them signed. It should be noted that they charge an excessive fee of approximately €958 for the registration of the .ie domain name in their database.

We would like to reassure all of our customers that no such organisation has been authorised to act on behalf of the IEDR. If you are contacted in this manner we would recommend that you disregard this letter and advise your customers to be aware of this activity.

The IEDR are responding to enquiries from concerned domain holders, by recommending them to contact an official IE Reseller if they require any further Internet services for their website.

The offical list of IE domain name resellers is here.