Possible Domain Appraisal Scam

Posted by Scott on March 27th, 2008 .

Found a new domain appraisal service last week, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was a scam, actually quite a good angle, I noticed a post on Acorn about Whythink offer free appraisals, always interesting to get someone else’s objective opinion - if it is that.

I decided to send in some domains through their form and after a few days received the following email

Dear Scott,

tvs.co.uk £3000
homemortgage.co.uk £800
belief.co.uk £500
genes.co.uk £350

Please let me know if you need assistance selling these domains,

Regards
Whythink

thief1.jpgI think the last line gives it away there, not exactly the type of prices I was expecting considering they had seemingly appraised paperback.co.uk at £2500, it would look like they possibly undervalue some domain appraisals with a hope to buying them cheaply which would be quite a good if not immoral idea, either that or it’s all legit but I would seriously doubt it because at those prices I would feel robbed :)

Still, something to be aware of just in case it is not the innocent view of one company.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 and is filed under Domains . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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3 Comments »

Comment by Satch
2008-03-28 13:30:09

H Scott, it was me who started the thread on acorn. I thought they were genuine based on the appraisals they gave me. In the email they sent me the last line was “Please let me know if you need any more help. Regards”. So they obviously didn’t want to buy mine! You are right they must undervalue them with an aim to buy them from you. Im not sure if it can be classed as a scam, just bad practice in my opinion. And the scraping they seem to be doing is another bad practice!

 
2008-06-08 18:33:10

[...] Possible Domain Appraisal Scam http://selfmademinds.com/200803/domain-appraisal-scam/ [...]

 
2008-09-13 20:42:48

My Name is Helen Taylor, I work for Whythink. One of my roles is to appraise domains.

The service is free to all UK domain owners and has no malice or underhand intentions.

Domainers might find the valuations lower that they had hoped, but that is merely our opinion based on selling many thousands of pounds worth of domains to UK businesses face to face.

The value of a domain is the monetary value (or profit) it can give a commercial organisation, not simply in the domain being short or catchy.

 
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