Jimmy's weblog

A letter arrived in the mail yesterday from a company called Domain Names Australia (DNA). It caught my eye as it was addressed “n/a” which is not a name that you’d usually expect to see as the addressee on an envelope.

“n/a” is what I fill in the organisation or company field when registering domain names. Over the last two years I have received five or six letters from domain name resellers who have harvested domain name registration records in an attempt to solicit business.

All of these letters have been designed to look like invoices requiring payment rather than a letters of solicitation, and the latest letter from DNA was no exception. In common with standard invoices it had:

• A date due / closing date for payment
• A reference number
• A “RE: Domain name registration” header implying it was a response to me
• A payment amount and instructions
• A page layout very similar to an invoice

s, it did state that “This is a solicitation for your registration of the above domain name” which other letters have not.

The letter contained an offer for me to register the domain name www.nero-design.com.au for two years at a cost of AUD$237. It didn’t mention that I would need a valid Australian business registration in the name of nero-design or that Click N Go are offering the same registration for AUD$99.

I decided to do some Google research on DNA and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Not surprisingly, their were plenty of results containing warnings against the company for this type of letter, including two warnings from the AU Domain Authority (auDA) dated June 17 and 19, 2003. There was also a June 29 announcement of an undertaking and corrective action from DNA relating to earlier letters they had sent out.

A little more searching uncovered some interesting information about ownership of the company. DNA is controlled by Paul Chesley Rafferty who was in control of Internet Registry Pty Ltd when it was taken to Federal Court during 2002 (References here and here). It seems Mr Rafferty is not stranger to this type of misleading solicitation as a Google search will reveal.

I still don’t know why DNA offered me nero-design.com.au in the first place. I did register 230kerrstreet.net about two weeks ago so I can see my address might have been harvested from a list of new registrations, but I can’t figure out why they chose that domain name. I may have enquired about nero-design.com (without the .au) two or three years ago but certainly not recently.

Where did they find the information linking that domain name with me?