Selling to spammers?

Edwin · Mar 3, 2016

(I think there was a thread about this a while back, but I couldn't find any recent discussion so...)

Does anyone try and market their domains to spammers? By which, I mean replying to unsolicited commercial emails from supposedly UK-based entities where you own a domain name that's 100% relevant to, and clearly better than, the one they're emailing from?

If so, did you see any success? Any tips or advice?

Stephen · Mar 3, 2016

Don't get seduced by the Dark side!

Stay on the path of good

Don't get seduced by the Dark side!

Stephen

Edwin · Mar 3, 2016

DomainAngel said:
I don't think too many people would want to help spammers and scammers cause any more trouble.

By taking a payment you would have to make sure they are legitimate otherwise your potentially involving yourself in money laundering, profiting from the proceeds of crime, maybe even more serious charges.

That's a good point, thanks.

I figured if they have a UK Ltd company that shows up in Companies House and a matching website they're probably legit enough, but maybe that's too low a hurdle.

Also, there is a difference between a spammer and a scammer. The former is promoting their product/service using unsolicited commercial email (which isn't necessarily even illegal depending on how carefully they're choosing their recipients, see http://www.lawdonut.co.uk/law/sales...tising/your-email-marketing-and-anti-spam-law for example) and the latter is out and out dodgy. I'd never even think of trying to sell anything to any entity that was obviously involved in scamming people or committing fraud!

I'll give you an example: today, I had an email from a company promoting a service for "factoring invoices". They had a .co.uk website, which had all the stuff you'd expect to see i.e. "About Us", "Contact Info" etc., a geographic phone number that matched their alleged location, and a limited company that was on the register. So I replied briefly and politely saying I didn't need their service right now, but I did happen to own the domain "factoringinvoices.co.uk" in case they were interested it.