Polish Registar Scam - Part 2

**Seraphim** · 09-27-2007, 07:42 AM

First, if you are not acquainted with how Home.pl tried to scam me, the DNForum thread is here for you to read. After handing out a life long boycott to Home.pl for the attempted bait and switch, I decided to try out AZ.pl, another supposed top Polish registar. The first sign something was wrong, was when I hit their home page and realized they have copied GoDaddy's website almost to a T. Hopefully a cease and desist letter is right around the corner on that. Anyways, going against my better judgement and being enticed by their 8 euro price per .pl domain, I thought what the hell and decided to "book" a bulk amount of domains for credit card purchase and registration. As the plot thickened, for some strange reason AZ's payment processor AllPay.eu kept rejecting my credit card payments, despite bank approval and a faxed copy of my credit card and passport. AllPay.eu blocked my credit card right up through another one of these "so called Polish registrar promotions", and I suddenly found myself in a situation where I damn near accidentally purchased 200 domains for 15 euro, as opposed to the 8 euro offer that was applied to my entire account just yesterday. Was AllPay.eu complicit in this, I don't know for sure, but there is certainly some shady stuff going here. I will be watching my credit card balance like a hawk for the next couple of months, hopefully this is as far south as the situation will go.

An update on the home.pl situation, after the bait and switch failed, and my "booked" domains begin to drop, the bastards actually picked off a few of the dropped domains for themselves. I expect the same thing to happen with AZ.pl.

For now, I'm going to trim my reg lists, and just go with Moniker on these at the higher rate. I must say though, if Poland's top registrars are this sleazy, it really does make me wonder if I should be investing at all in the market. If a representative at NASK happens to come across this [or whoever manages the ccTLD], my advice to you is clean your house. Stop this 14 day domain book, bait and switch scam. And secondly, do something about the query jacking occurring by Polish registrar employees. If you want proof send me a PM and I'll put together solid evidence for you.

Mods please allow me to post this both here in the Gold forum, and in the .pl ccTLD section. People interested in .pl's need to read this.

**adamwagner** · 04-09-2010, 05:54 PM

Dear Seraphim,

I am afraid you are not the only one customer huntered on "promotions" which are permanent and very tricky in fact. You post was written in 2007 but nothing's changed up to now. The main scheme is as following - "register a domain name for free or for 1 PLN". Sometimes you can do it in fact, sometimes only few names can be registered for such pricing. Anyway, the main "surprise" will meet you when:
A. you would like to get an authinfo code for your domain to transfer it out
B. you would like to renew your names.

In A. point, in 90% cases you will not be allowed to get an authcode, in practice. To get the codes, you will be forced to fullfill several (financial) obligations.
In B. point, the renewal price will be ~100 PLN, so arround 34 USD.

On the market, there are only several Registrars which you can rely on and derive adv - AfterMarket.pl (together with dropcatching services) and EuroDNS.com with a constant pricing and multi-TLD management in 1 account - these are Registrars which I recommend.

Don't be angry for this ccTLD - it's very interesting ccTLD for investors, with an impressive growth scale.