Domain Scams

Domain scams often tell you that your domain is about to expire or to "register SEO for your domain". To work out if your email or phone call is a scam, some things to look out for include:

• Speaking to an organisation you are unfamiliar with
• Offering you lifetime ownership or SEO registration of a domain. Neither of these are possible.
• The links are long and obscure.
• The email senders address is random.
• Emails often include overuse of capital letters, spelling and grammar errors

We recommend not clicking links in these emails or replying to them until you check directly with your domain registrar to know if they are legitimate. Also, it's worth noting how many domains you own, you may actually have multiple domains registered and your renewal notices could be legitimate.

Fake Emails About Payments

Scammers are very intelligent and can track your website habits. Scam emails will most commonly look like they have come from legitimate companies like PayPal, eBay, Etsy or other e-commerce platforms and look very real. They usually contain a purchase that you didn't make, suggesting you click on a link if you DIDN'T make the transaction. Red flags to look out for include:

• Long, random email addresses
• No mention of your name or other account details (however, sometimes they're sophisticated enough to know your name)
• A really prominent call to action button
• Emails often include overuse of capital letters, spelling and grammar errors

We recommend NOT clicking on any links and contact the platform directly to confirm is the email is legitimate. 

Fake Facebook Competitions

The goal of many fake competitions is to take you off-site and get data from you through a survey. Quite often the prizes are high value, such as luxury vacations or electronics. They pretend they're from legitimate businesses such as Flight Centre or Qantas. Red flags include:

• Most scams will get you to fill in a dodgy survey to "validate" your entry. The page usually has a weird URL.
• Non-official and non-verified Facebook pages. Their Facebook name may include extra punctuation like full stops and hyphens etc.
• Their pages may not have many posts and posts may have grammar and spelling errors
• Often has no terms and conditions

If a Facebook competition has some or many of these attributes, we recommend looking into it further and if it still seems suspicious, it's safer to not enter the competition and report it to Facebook so they can investigate.

Other Tips for Avoiding Scams

• Be vigilant to ensure you are not clicking any suspicious links
• If you visit a dodgy website, don't enter any of your data 
• If you're unsure whether something is a spam, be safe and get a second opinion 
• Make sure you have multiple different passwords for all your different accounts, we recommend a password manager like LastPass to manage all your passwords.