One more follow up, then I'll stop, I promise. We had yet another customer taken in by this today. We called him up on the phone after we received a notice that he was planning to transfer to eNom (because we know that Domain Registry of America uses eNom), and indeed he had received mail from DROA, thought it was from us, and sent them the renewal fee.
We explained in great detail on the telephone that he had been taken in by a scam, that DROA and eNom have nothing to do with us (Tiger Technologies, an OpenSRS reseller), and that he should decline the transfer. Even after all this, less than an hour later we got this message from him when he looked at the transfer approval message: >I am very confused. I want to stay with you guys are you eNom??? So there you have it. Even when it's all explained to them, some people still don't get it -- in their minds, there is this crazy patchwork quilt of companies that they have to deal with, and who knows what's what. That's what we're up against. If I can offer a little feedback to OpenSRS, OpenSRS isn't helping by sometimes using the name "Tucows" without "OpenSRS" in messages to customers. Here's the first paragraph of the "transfer approval" message he got: > A request has been received to transfer the domain XXX > away from the Registrar Tucows. So, from his point of view, he's now dealing with: - Tiger Technologies - OpenSRS - Tucows - Domain Registry of America - eNom Five separate company names, and every single one of them has implied in some way that his domain is registered with them or needs to be renewed with them! You can see how people get confused. (And heaven forbid we mention Verisign registry...) As a small step to improve this, maybe OpenSRS could make sure that whenever the word "Tucows" appears in a message to end users, it is accompanied by "OpenSRS", as in "Tucows/OpenSRS". (Even better would be to pick one or the other and stick with it...!) And while this might not pass legal muster, ideally the reseller's name would appear, too: > A request has been received to transfer the domain XXX > away from Tiger Technologies (a reseller of domain registrar > Tucows/OpenSRS). After all, the one name the customer should probably know is the reseller's name, and making it clear that the transfer is severing the customer's relationship with the reseller would be helpful. Just a thought. -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies "The trouble with doing something right the first time is that nobody appreciates how difficult it was."
