I’ve been getting repeated voicemail messages from an outfit called Courtesy Support Team over the past month. They want to talk to me about domain names that I’ve registered.
They announce themselves as an “affiliate business partner of Network Solutions.” While this sounds all official-like, this “affiliate business partner” thing appears to mean the same thing as me saying I’m an “affiliate business partner of Wendy’s” because I buy my hamburgers there.
While the are listed on Network Solutions’ International Strategic Partners page, they are not Network Solutions, they’re simply a reseller of their services.
The fact that they don’t appear to have a website themselves would seem to be a basic qualification for having nothing to do with them, to say nothing of the “affiliate business partner” sham.
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We’ve been getting the same
We’ve been getting the same calls. Being a web company we have a quite a few domains registered. A smart company would sort the “people we’re going to call” database by name, this company is not smart. Instead of calling us once and asking us if we’d like renew, upgrade, expand, etc.. all of our domain names they’ve chosen to call us once for each and every domain name we have. After the fifth phone call I explained that we had many different domain names and would appreciate it if they would not call us regarding any of those. He then said that in order to do that I would have to go to a website and compile a list of domains we use, our contact info, etc.
Long live efficiency…
Courtesy Support Team are
Courtesy Support Team are indeed a sham and a scam. I encountered them when they called my employers in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in November of 2001. They were calling about the employers’ domain name, and claimed to be the “Customer Service Division of Network Solutions in Canada”.
I was so impressed that Network Solutions was finally in Canada giving us a little service up here, that I agreed to buy my own domain name from them, something I had been wanting to do for a long time.
I sent them $140 Canadian dollars in cash in a security envelope via Canada Post, addressed to Network Solutions at the Toronto address given to me by Courtesy Support Team.
since that time, they (i) kept my money while refusing to issue an invoice or a receipt; (ii) refused to provide the cloaking for my url that their rep Rick Diamond had promised by phone was included in the package I paid for; (iii) tried to charge me EXTRA for the cloaking after first arguing with me that cloaking over a tripod site was “impossible” due to technical restrictions by tripod — until I showed them cloaking in action at cjb.net at which point they changed their minds and demanded more money to do what Diamond had already LIED stating they would do.
I then chased my domain name for the next two years while they (iv) registered it under a fake company name and fake contact name, but care of their own Toronto address; (v) were able to get PROTECTION for their fraud from BOTH ICANN and NETWORK SOLUTIONS, who refused to force them to release control of the WHO IS to me so I could correct the misinformation in it; and (iii) then got MORE FRAUD from www.ZONEEDIT.com where finally, after long arguments and expensive faxes to Network Solutions, I was able to get them to point the domain name to zoneedit.com servers, after which zoneedit.com DISABLED the subdomain capability the moment I tried to USE MY DOMAIN NAME to create accounts for clients of mine with path forwarding.
After screwing me out of my domain name, and therefore out of my BUSINESS for over two years, Courtesy Support Team’s Darren Morgenstern, who owns that con operation and many others, appears to have BOUGHT my said domain under another business of his and attached a slew of advertising to it. My DOMAIN that I bought from these CROOKS was: www.canadianresumes.com. The site I intended to hook up to it is now located at: www.freewebs.com/canadianresum…
You will do well to avoid this man and these people: I only found out AFTER I got suckered in November of 2001 that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission had sued Morgenstern and his gang for fraud and won (see pdf as follows):
http://www.ftc.gov/os/2001/02/…
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