I just received an email from domainrenewalonline.com. They told me to renew my joop.in domain within 90 days to prevent expiration. I was shocked! What does this mean, and who is sending this.

When I was thinking about this, I realized that I just moved this domain to a new domain registrar. Maybe something went wrong during that process?

So I have contacted my registrar, and they confirmed that this email is a trick from a third party. They get domainname information from the WHOIS database, and send this mails in advance. The site looks pretty authentic, but it’s just a scam.

I geolocated the sender as mailer2.domainrenewal-online.com in Norrtälje, Sweden. The Whois database returns the following address for domeinrenewalsonline.com: Domain Renewal SA, Avenue Louise 65, Brussels, BE.

The scammers fined my ‘renewal’ for €69.95 ($95,– USD), it feels like I saved this amount of money today! I might buy my friends a round of beers tonight :)

I wonder how much money they make from others with this scam.