Oh, Great! Another scam...

So I get a phone call from a nice lady who identifies herself as a transfer notification agent for the pseudo-official sounding Domain Support Group. She said she was calling to let me know about "changes on the Internet that could affect" my domain name.

Now, I was suspicious from the get-go for a couple of reasons:

1. The call came to my cell phone, and I have never, repeat never, in the 5+ years that I've been registering domain names, had a registrar call me on my cell phone.
2. The call came from a number with CallerID blocked.

If those things weren't enough, her statements didn't pass the sniff test ("changes on the Internet"? Could they be any less technical?). So I told her that I had a hard time believing she was legit, at which point she promptly hung up. I decided to do a little digging, and thanks to Google came up with the following links:

http://www.paulgraham.com/domsupgroup.html
http://www.niner.net/docs/dsg.shtml
http://www.bankersonline.com/technology/techalert_040902.html (scroll down)

Sadly, these bozos must be succeeding in getting at least a few people to bite and hand over their credit card #s, or else they wouldn't be in business. I'm sure most of you probably already know this, but the lesson to be learned (preferably not the hard way) is to never, ever give your credit card # to someone who cold-calls or faxes you. The fewer times slimeballs like this succeed, the better the chance that they'll stop (or at least move onto something less difficult, like the Nigerian email scams).