What’s a slamming?

The slamming is a well-known variant of phishing in the domain names’ world. It consists in encouraging domain names owners to renew their annuity with another registrar, by arguing the emergency and criticality of the concerned name’s loss.

There are two kinds of slamming:

• The fake renewal invoice: this practice consists in sending a domain name’s expiration notification, which is in reality, a domain name transfer request towards another provider.

If the domain name’s owner doesn’t check and answers positively to this notification, their domain name will be transferred to a new provider.

• The registration blackmail: a company receives a registrar’s mail informing that a domain name concerning them, or a similar domain name, is about to be registered by a third party. Then the registrar proposes them the priority for immediate registration of this name, in exchange of a cost in general, higher than the average of course. In most cases, this is a scam!

How to protect against slamming?

• Be vigilant;
• Check the links by hovering the cursor over them (without clicking) to ensure that they link to trustworthy websites;
• Do not reply under the pressure of this kind of solicitation and do not proceed to any payment;
• If there is any doubt, contact the sender through another method, they will confirm if it really is a fraud attempt or not.

You can find on the blog a detailed article about slamming.