Domain name renewal scams aren't new - our clients have been dealing with them for years - but I figured it would be helpful to warn you about them again. A Google search brings up thousands of examples of these renewal scammes and schemes.

The usual way this works, known as domain slamming, is fairly basic, and works just about the same way telephone slammers do. Companies with very questionable ethics download millions of WHOIS records for domain registration information and domain expiry dates. Then, a few months before the domain expires, they snail mail or e-mail a very official looking and sounding document or message that tells them to protect their valuable name by renewing early. Here are a couple of scanned examples.

Of course, when the domain owner sends the check or pays by credit card, thinking they are doing the right thing, what actually happens is that a registrar transfer is initiated. The registrant will then go through the steps to complete the transfer, because they think they're doing the correct thing in response to the (fake) renewal notice they received.

You can protect yourself fairly simply. Here's a few recommendations:

Also, always make sure you know your registration administration information, such as your domain login and password.

I was talking with a client today, and just randomly we started discussing employee Internet usage and the amount of time wasted. It gets to be staggering pretty quickly, if you do the math.

Suppose an employee spends 6 minutes per work day on the Internet doing things that are clearly not work related. That's 30 minutes a week. Or, 1,560 minutes per year - equal to 26 hours.

If that employee's burdened cost is $15/hour, your company just spent $390 for absolutely nothing.

If you have 10 employees, figure almost $4,000 per year in wasted time.

And that is if they waste only 6 minutes per work day.

My conversation with the client ended up there. But I thought about it some more when I got back to the office, and ran it out a little further....

Let's say you have an employee who consistently comes in right at the bell, so to speak. So, they run to the time clock, punch in, and then go through the process of taking off their boots and coat (remember, we're in Michigan... it gets cold here!), putting their things away, booting up their computer, socializing for a few minutes before they get started, perhaps even get their coffee ready.

Then this employee punches in from lunch, and spends a few extra minutes after they're punched in finishing up whatever they were doing on their lunch hour.

If you add all of that up, you can easily envision a scenario where you've lost 30 minutes a day to nonsense.

Which equals 130 hours of time you have paid this employee in a year, for which you've received nothing.

At our illustrative $15/hour burdened cost, that's $1,950 per year in completely wasted labor expense.

If you have a few of these people on staff, or their cost to you is even higher, the pointless expense to your company becomes staggering pretty quickly.

We have software we sell that monitors and reports on employee's Internet usage.... So that base is potentially covered.

But how do you deal with the "leaked time" in the scenario above?

Short of being a drill sergeant in your business, I'm not sure of the answer. I'd imagine, as with most things, it involves a delicate act of line-walking between too strict and not strict enough.