The practice is old, it is criminal, but year after year the scam continues to be practiced in the market.
Website registration bill scams typically involve malicious companies or individuals sending fake bills to website owners, claiming that payment is required to renew their domain registration.
Scammers may use tactics such as public “ Whois ” information to find out the owner of the domain and send the boleto with an official appearance. However, these boletos are fake and are not associated with any legitimate entity. It is important for website owners to carefully verify the origin of any boletos they receive and confirm the validity of the invoices before making any payments.
How does the scam work?
Every year, website owners receive invoices to renew the registration of domains for websites they own.
Knowing this, some companies send invoices very similar forex data to those for registration renewal, normally with a value well above that charged by Registro.br (R$40.00 per year).
The bills, however, do not refer to the renewal of registrations but rather to the contracting of services, such as new registrations of international domains (.com) or website hosting.
Ex: A company that has a website with the domain “barateiro .com.br ” can receive bills with a registration service for similar domains, such as “barateiro .com ”, “barateiro .net.br ”, and so on.
They also create names and logos that are very similar to those of Registro.br, so that an unsuspecting person, upon receiving the bill, will not notice the difference.
Some of the companies you can find on these bills include:
RegistroBrasil.com, Host.inf.br, Registrar.br.com, Nicregistro.com, among others…
fake ticket registration
If a service is offered, where is the crime?
If you call one of the phone numbers on the bill out of curiosity, you will be promptly answered by a well-trained employee who, at any sign of fraud accusation, will say that the bill is a “hosting or registration proposal”, and that if you want to host with them, just pay, and if you don’t, just ignore it.
However, according to the Central Bank , it is prohibited to send bills charging for unsolicited services, and failure to do so must be reported to the police, who will open an investigation into the case.
According to the Consumer Protection Code, sending a bill without the consumer's request is considered an abusive practice and may be punished with sanctions provided for by law, such as fines and even the temporary or permanent suspension of the company's activities.
You need to be very careful, however, because as it is a difficult crime to investigate, it is usually very difficult to get the money back.