Hi everyone,

Recently I received an email from dechem.pttrs@gmail.com with the subject “Special Offer (4L domain .com)” – the 4L .com I removed from the subject. Below is the message I’ve copied:

“Dear Domain Owner,

My names are Sandra Schulze, a representative of a private firm and I am reaching out to you to inquire about the possible purchase of your domain name 4L .com (domain removed).

We have a very lucrative offer for the domain which we know you have held ownership for a very lengthy period and our hope is that the offer meets your expectation.

I will furnish you with more details including the financial offer, agreement, and payment procedures as soon as I get your continuation response.

Warmest regards,
Sandra Schulze”

I asked this scammer what’s their offer and in response, I received the following message which has several red flags:

Thank you for your speedy response to my email notification on the proposed acquisition of your domain name 4L .com. We know that you have had ownership of the four-letter domain since 2000 and my clients are more than willing to offer a lump sum final offer of five million United States dollars.

Furthermore, I’d like to inform you that I work on a commission with my clients on the successful acquisition of the domain name which will be of great benefit to me and to you if the proposed sum is agreed.

Our mode of payment will be via  escrow.com and I will be setting up the new transaction with your email address, please specify if you are conversant with escrow.com so that I can elaborate if you are not.

Escrow services require a fee that will be shared by both buyer and seller and I will draw the agreement indicating the roles of both buyer and seller which will be signed by all parties before we proceed to escrow to make payments, the transfer of the domain name and conclude formalities.

Looking forward to your response to continuing this acquisition.

Regards,
Sandra Schulze“

Now the first red flag is that the domain is listed for sale at $50,000 and the scammer offered to buy it for 5 million US$ which is outrageous. At least this person should’ve done some research like what price this domain is listed for, also who the domain owner is, whether it’s a seasoned domain investor or someone with 1-5 domains only.

I responded the scammer with the following message:

“The domain is available for purchase for $50,000 only so you’ll save $4,950,000.

You may start the escrow with escrow.com using our email address xxxxx@xxxxxxxx.com (redacted) and we’re frequently using their services and don’t require any external agreements to sign it.

If your client is a serious buyer, then go ahead and initiate the transaction.

Best regards

AbdulBasit”

It’s been more than a month now and there is complete silence whereas I received the first two emails within 24 hours. It was very obvious

My point of saying it’s a creative way of scam is because before these scammers asked to use some escrow service and behind the scenes they themselves own it and provide with less appraisal value and don’t even bother buying the domain and usually just run away with the appraisal amount paid by the domain owner. But this time, this scammer said to use escrow.com to look like a legit person but eventually would’ve asked to use some shitty appraisal service before initiating the escrow at escrow.com which would’ve never happened.

So Sandra or whatever your real name is, just do some research next time like checking the prices and stop bothering domain owners especially with a lot of domains as they won’t come in your trap.

To my loyal readers and followers, please feel free to share any scam email addresses or messages you’ve received in recent times to make others aware of it.

Thank you!

Hello everyone,

I’ve been using Sedo.com for the last 17 years and have seen a lot of improvements and have made a few good and great sales through them. I wanted to share some of my experience and give some suggestions regarding Sedo.

One of the most needed features is 2FA which should be implemented as soon as possible. Currently if anyone’s account gets hacked, the hacker can change the price and buy the domain which will come into the possession of the hacker in minutes due to Sedo MLS if the seller has already opted-in. This is a must feature and they must bring it on quickly.

Sedo External Escrow service is a great alternative escrow service if someone has any issues with Escrow.com like they’re currently not supporting accounts from several countries. I’ve used Sedo’s escrow service countless times and I’ve had an overall pleasant experience. The only issue with this service is that the buyer or the seller needs to contact Sedo at transferservice@sedo.com with the subject “External Transfer Request” and they require the following data to be sent in the email:

Domain name
Total sales price (including VAT if applicable)
Currency (USD / EUR / GBP)
Sedo Login Seller
Sedo Login Buyer
Which party will pay for the Sedo commission* – (Seller / Buyer / Split Fees)
Keep the domain sale confidential – (Yes / No)

The above method of initiating the escrow transaction is too old and needs to be automated through their site itself rather than the person requiring to manually do all that via email and sometimes the email may not be delivered or ends up in spam or something…

Also recently I encountered an issue when the sale happened via Sedo MLS which is similar to Afternic Fast Transfer sale. Once the sale email came in, I wanted to communicate with the transfer agent but the communication/message center was disabled due to which I was unable to communicate with the transfer agent. I had to contact the support to get things sorted out. It will be good if Sedo will keep the message center open like for every other transaction to communicate with the transfer agent smoothly and quickly.

With Sedo MLS, I’ve noticed the slight increase in sales via Sedo which was not there before when all my domains were with Uniregistry. Currently I’m keeping all my domains with Dynadot which offers both Sedo MLS and Afternic DLS.

Last but not the least, Sedo payout is very quick. But if they can add an option to select the payout method for each and every sale would be great.

Feel free to share your feedback, suggestions and let your voice be heard.

Hello everyone,

Recently I came across a great tip to find out about a “Pending Sale” at Sedo.com, all credits to Alex Verdea who shared it at Twitter in detail.

As per the image above shared by Alex, if you go to your Domain Management and select “Sales Settings” or even “Custom Overview” which is normally selected at my end, you then need to sort the price in “Ascending” order. Since all of my listings are BIN priced the same like Alex, so you’ll see any “Pending Sale” having blue triangle and yellow triangle shows the domains are not listed for sale and I’ve a few of them with that status.

I was checking this thing the day before yesterday and found out that there was a pending sale of $2,988 for which I received a sale confirmation email from Sedo today morning which made me want to share it with you all.

Thanks to Alex for this wonderful tip and I’m sure many of the investors will now be regularly checking it in their account.

Feel free to share your experience if any of you knew about this or have come across any sale by knowing in advance this way.

Hello everyone,

This is something part of the domain business and many investors are curious as to what domain owners with thousands of domains under their portfolio do after acquiring the domains. By the way, currently I own 8,600 domains as of now.

Okay, so coming back to the topic, below I’ve shared it in detail.

The first thing I do after acquiring a domain name is to add in my records as some people use Excel sheets and some have their own way of storing the data. After that I change the nameservers to Afternic (ns3.afternic.com/ns4.afternic.com) and add it to my Afternic account as well as Sedo to have an additional exposure.

Once the domain completes the 60 days lock period, I always move out the domain to my preferred registrar, earlier it was Uniregistry but now after it’s getting shut down, I’ve moved all of my domains to Dynadot. After the domain transfer is completed, the next thing is to activate Afternic Fast Transfer and Sedo MLS to get additional exposure at their partner registrars. Make sure the domain is successfully added in your respective accounts before you approve the Fast Transfer requests by Afternic and Sedo which usually shows at Dynadot under Summary page. It varies how it will reflect at your end depending on the registrars. Once the domain is successfully added to your account, then only approve the FT requests. Otherwise wait until the previous/old listing is deleted and your domain is added to your account before approving it.

Also I don’t keep the domains on auto-renew as I want to renew it myself because you can never rely on the auto-renew option. I always renew the domains in advance and try to buy domains which I plan *not* to drop in the future. This makes the domain renewal management pretty easier in the sense that I’ve to simply select the domains and renew it. It took several years of experience and learning process to buy only those types of domains which I believe are not the type of domains I will be dropping in the future. I recommend especially to big portfolio holders (typically in thousands) to buy only these types of domains you don’t plan to drop ever because scanning through the list, doing some research is super time consuming for making the decision whether to renew or not.

Feel free to share your experience as to what you do after acquiring the domain.

Thank you!

Hello everyone,

It’s been around a year since I started moving out my domains from Uniregistry to Dynadot. The reason as we all know is that Uniregistry is shutting down pretty soon so it was good for me to slowly but steadily move out my domains. It’s not easy to transfer out 8,000+ domains in one-go mainly because of the funds required for transferring out which of course adds one year of renewal but doing this isn’t possible when the new purchases are actively ongoing along with the renewals and usual transfers from different registrars.

Today I want to tell you about my experience with Dynadot.

From a security perspective, I really like this registrar because for transferring out any domain from my account, it requires to enter Google Authenticator code + SMS code simultaneously. This is a very good feature and I highly recommend everyone to enable it with your Dynadot account.

From a pricing point of view, it’s better than Uniregistry but not attractive enough like GoDaddy and a few more whom I know offer a little better rates both of renewals and transfers especially .com domains. I have no hard feelings on this one but at least they should occasionally offer up some .com renewal code but I don’t think they ever do it. Yes, they occasionally offer .com transfer coupons but that also is not that impressive like some other registrars do. If they can focus on this part, I’m sure they’ll get more new customers and more loyal existing customers.

The UI is simple and nice once you’re familiar with it. One of the best things is they offer to make different folders which is a must feature for me to have. On the “Manage Domains” page, you’ve the option to display 100, 250, 500, 750, 1,000 and 5,000 domains in one page. Once you select 5,000 domains, the loading time is too much and the browser gets stuck at times. Don’t tell me my laptop is slow, which isn’t at all 😀 I think Dynadot needs to fix this loading time problem and allow some 2,000 or 3,000 domains to display in one page. Up till 1,000 there are 5 selections but after that it’s way up to 5,000 and nothing in the middle.

Another thing is that if you’ve 500 domains in one page and you need to select 350 domains, you’re required to select one by one manually and can’t simply select the first domain and press SHIFT key and select the 350th domain to select 350 domains altogether like it can happen at Uniregistry.

The expiring auction part is one of the worst things with Dynadot and I know many domain investors have complaints with them. It’s been reported to them multiple times but they don’t fix it. The issue is when the domain enters the auction, the domain registrant has time to renew the domain during the auction as well as after the auction is over which is not at all good. It’s a complete mess and waste of time for the auction participants. On top of that, if the winning bidder has paid for the domain and the domain gets renewed, the person will get the refund back as Dynadot credit (correct me if I’m wrong because on this last point I’m not 100% sure). But the auction should only start when the registrant has no more time left to renew it. This will allow the bidders to peacefully bid on the domains as they will be assured of getting the domain.

One of the best things with Dynadot is that they offer both Afternic DLS and Sedo MLS and this is a must for every domain investor to keep in mind when deciding the registrar. I can assure you that sales do increase when you’ve both DLS and MLS enabled so please carefully select your registrar.

Another good thing is that anyone can credit a balance for you if you create an order with any sum of amount and provide it for making the payment. You may use that balance for any kind of purchases with Dynadot.

I’m sure there are many other pros and cons altogether at Dynadot but one thing I’ll add before wrapping up my post is that I’ve been assigned with a dedicated account rep “Caleb Tweed” who has been exceptional in assisting right from the start I’ve moved in my domains to Dynadot. Thanks to him.

Feel free to give your feedback on using Dynadot and if you’ve anything to add, just add in the comment section and I’ll make sure that it’s been forwarded to the Dynadot team.