Naming and shaming 01229 846236, a worthy addition to anybody’s blocked caller list.
I’m forever being cold-called by people who want to part me from my hard earned.. uh.. earnings.., but this particular chancer got up my nose this week.
His spiel went along the lines of “…because you bought the domain of dses.co.uk through Nominet, this pre-qualifies you with Nominet to now have the domains electricianinwarwick.co.uk and electricianinleamingtonspa.co.uk”.
He’s less than fifteen seconds in and already I know I’m being lied to. I’ve owned various web domain names since the late Nineties, so I’m familiar with who Nominet are and the process of registering a domain name, self hosting a site, having a site hosted, or using a domain name as a redirect, and I know for damn sure Nominet aren't about to give a peasant like me owt for nowt!
For those not in the know, Nominet handle the top level .uk domain suffix and its second level variants such as .co.uk, .org.uk, .net.uk and so on. If you want a uk domain name, then you order it through an authorised registrar who sits between you and Nominet handling the registration, payment and admin.
So yes, I do have the dses.co.uk domain name registered with Nominet via a registrar for this website, however that qualifies me for absolutely nothing else expect first dibs on dses.uk (without the .co) which was made available by Nominet in June 2014 when they opened up .uk to be available for the first time to the great unwashed. As the owner of the .co.uk name, I'm given until June 2019 to claim the .uk variant before it is made publicly available. The same goes for anyone else who has a domain of domainname.[whatever].uk since October 2013.
So no, electricianinleamingtonspa.co.uk or electricianinwarwick.co.uk has nothing at all to do with Nominet offering me anything special. Why would they? What qualifies me over anyone else to pick up these domains? Anyone can buy any domain they like at any time so long as it's not already registered to anyone else and doesn't infringe any trademarks. This telephonic asshat has no association with Nominet and is in no position to offer me anything on their behalf. This is, at best, a marketing company who have bought these domains from Nominet via a registrar and are looking to punt them on, or at worst a complete scam by people making up domain names they think sound tempting, then taking payments for doing next to nothing.
The trouble is, Mr Muppet wouldn’t take sod-off for an answer and kept pushing it. So, I asked him where does it end? How about BestElectricianInLeamingtonSpa.co.uk or TopSparkieInWarwick.net or ReliableCoventryElectrician.uk or ElectricianWithOrangeVanSomewhereNearSoutham.org.uk? And that’s the issue, you could come up with hundreds of domain names if you sit down and think of them, all covering various areas, attributes and domain suffixes. If that’s want you want to do, and if you really want to splash out on the annual fees for all the names you can think of registering, then you can do so directly through a registrar within minutes via the comfort of your home with no technical experience and without the need for a third party middle-man. Each name would cost a two-figure sum when done directly, not a three-figure-fisting a third party may charge for the privilege of completing a simple online form on your behalf.
"But this wouldn’t be just be a registration or a redirect", says Mr Muppet, "we’d copy your existing site to this domain!"
What the hell use is that? Like I’m going to hand over the keys to the back end of my website to a cold caller, let them extract the database and files and upload it to a server that, no doubt, I have to pay them to maintain? Why would I want multiple instances of the same site? Am I supposed to edit and maintain them all individually?
In the end, after me repeatedly saying no to his ridiculous arguments and proposals, he said “So let me confirm, you’re saying you don’t want the extra business these domains would bring in, is that right?”
Yes you twat, that’s correct. Whatever three-figure sum you’re planning on charging me annually for these really shit domain names is not worth the business they (won't) bring in. You may find some sucker who has just set up shop, is a bit green on the whole interweb thing and who may fall for this, but it won’t be me.
Never do business with a cold caller. Making them waste their time and money on unsuccessful marketing calls is the only way they’ll learn!
Update 28/11/16 Today I had the same call from the same moron with the same spiel, but this time his number was 01229 314108. It looks like they're not having much luck in selling these usless domains - unless it's a scam and they're 'selling' the same domain to multiple people.
AFF5