Back in April of 2012, we wrote about the domain name registration scam. There’s now a new twist that’s making rounds among our clients and we want to make you aware so that you don’t get taken in.

One of the services we generally provide for our clients is DNS (Domain Name Service). DNS is like an address book, but instead of mapping names to telephone numbers it maps websites and related services (e.g., email servers) to IP Addresses.  There are companies that specialize in DNS. We’ve even written about one such company and their excellent service when we talked about protecting against phishing expeditions.

This latest scam is about DNS service and it comes from a company named DNS Services out of Vancouver, Washington. This company is sending out statements for payment that are really just solicitations for a service and it is a service that is never going to be used by anyone who unsuspectingly sends in the payment.

Recently a client of ours received a document in the mail that appeared to be an invoice from DNS Services. Below is a sample statement from DNS Services with our client’s information grayed out, but we also have highlighted the hard-to-find statement that makes it clear that you don’t have to send in a payment and that the statement is really just a solicitation for service.

If you ever receive an invoice related to your Internet service, your domain name, or your website, and you’re just not sure about the legitimacy of it, please run it by us. We might just save you a few dollars and a lot of headaches.