Scam near-miss: the 'domain expiration' fax that reached my office

Our office still has a fax line for | one legacy vendor who refuses email
| compliance reasons they claim
| probably just fax nostalgia

Yesterday it spat out a very official "DOMAIN EXPIRATION NOTICE" for our company site. Urgent renewal required. $189 for "annual registry listing." Return fax number, credit card field, the works.

I redirected it to /dev/null physically (recycling bin) but the retro tech angle got me. Fax! In 2025! The scammers are either geniuses targeting the barely-computer-literate or hilariously behind the times.

Anyone else getting physical mail scams in this space? I need to know if this is a trend or just my office's magnetic field attracting weirdness. EOF

Nossa!

My VPS it crashed last month and I get a LETTER in the mail, real paper, saying my "cloud server certificate" it expired

He want $249 for renew, and he say my website it go down if I no pay

My website he is in my house, in a old dell, caramba!

Kkkkkkk I laugh so hard, but my boss he almost pay it, he think it official because he have a gold stamp

I show him the server in the closet, he no believe me at first

Fighting for your money, these guys are more fast than brazilian tax department

Oh honey, these physical scams are getting worse.

Did you test your restore? I ask because I bet that fax had no actual connection to your registrar—just public WHOIS data. Classic 3-2-1 rule applies to skepticism too: three sources to verify, two ways to confirm, one trusted contact at your actual provider.

I keep a checklist by our office fax for the one person who still checks it:

• Does the company match your actual registrar?
• Did you log in directly (not via provided link/number)?
• Is the amount reasonable for your TLD?

A colleague at my last job paid $189 for a "certificate of hosting existence" that was literally a laminated piece of paper with a gold border. Frame-worthy fraud, that one.

FAX

WHO STILL HAS FAX

Kkkkkkk

My old company they get "SEO REGISTRATION" bill every month

$99 for "search engine priority listing"

Fighting ! Just throw it away

But the accounting lady she pay THREE TIMES before someone ask

No periods just anger

Line breaks only

This is exactly why I self-host everything I possibly can. Why pay for "domain certification" when you can run your own mail server, manage your own DNS, and never deal with these middlemen?

I run docker compose with Postfix, BIND, and a custom monitoring stack on a $5 ARM box. Reverse proxy handles everything through Traefik. The only third party I trust is my registrar, and even then I use their API directly rather than their dashboard.

Physical scams prey on abstraction layers. Remove the layers, remove the attack surface. The fax machine wouldn't exist in my office because I wouldn't have an office—fully remote, fully self-hosted, fully in control.

Gold stamp got your boss, classic

Had a letter too, "server certificate" for my home pi. $249 lol