Originally Posted by Stefan

I actually believed this guy. I told him a price, he said ok - but we must get an appraisal. He pointed me to a thread ( Domain Talk ) which looked like all postings there were written by the same single person. Anyway, after we exchanged a few eMails it came down to this: afternic.com is not acceptable regarding domain appraisals, so isn't Sedo (where my domains are listed right now), GreatDomains neither. But, securenamesale.com and DomainMart.com would be acceptable for him as they're supposedly trusted sources and do a decent manual appraisal of domains. So, I thought what the heck - and went with securenamesale.com for a one-time fee of 69 USD. The appraisal I got back listed close to 2,000 USD more (9,000 USD instead of 7,000 USD) for the domain than I originally told this guy. I gave this appraisal to the guy ("Paul") and he replied back: "Your appraisal looks reasonable" and that he will now get an independent appraisal by himself, either via NetworkSolutions or DomainMart. So that both of us will get a better feeling of what the domain is worth.

As I mentioned above he said he will either accept appraisals from securenamesale.com or DomainMart.com while DomainMart.com is more expensive ($200 USD / hour) and he said: "I consider it too expensive, but if you can afford it, it's fine with me."

So, does this mean this guy is connected to the people behind securenamesale.com and tries to get people to order domain appraisals via this service? And he probably speculates that if given two possibilities (securenamesale.com and DomainMart.com) the domain seller will always choose the less expensive service (securenamesale.com)? Or maybe he's behind both of those services?

Does anyone have an idea what those peoples goal is? Is it just about the one-time fee (69 USD) at securenamesale.com or will there be some follow-up regarding this? Credit card information collected / stolen? The last eMail I received from "Paul" was 3 days ago (25th October), haven't heard back from him yet.

I'd appreciate your thoughts and feedback.

Thanks,
Stefan

Originally Posted by cybernetic

Hi everybody,

As a recent victim of this scam, I decided to seek my revenge by creating a site dedicated to this scam. DomainAppraisalScam.com - The Domain Name Appraisal Scam! is the result.

Hopefully it will help expose this scam even more and prevent many others from falling for this strange scam.

Thanks,