DNS Restoration Scam

Interversant owns around 50 domain names. All of them are set to automatically renew with a credit card payment. All of them except one: Interversant.com.
 

I get emails from our registrar about experation every week because they were all registered at different times. I usually get 6 emails per domain. And I ignore them because they are all set to auto renew.

Last Friday, Interversant.com fell off the 30 day grace period that you get after a domain expires. Now I didn't notice this domain was different than the others. In fact the reminder email I received were in no way different from the ones I get that I can ignore. No mention that this name was not set to auto renew. No bold text that warned me that I was almost at the end of the grace period.

Once the grace period ends, an owner can pay to "restore" the domain or wait 65 days until it gets released as an unregistered domain. If you elect to wait, you can do nothing with the domain and names fail to resolve. In other words for 65 days after the grace period ends your web site is offline, you can't get email and if you use you domain name for anything else (like ecommerce) that won't work either.

Unless you pay the restoration fee. My registrar charges $150 to restore a domain. That fee is the equivalent of ransom. A .com domain costs less than $10 per year. I just had to pay the equivalent of 15 years of registration to get our domain name restored.

As soon as possible, I will be transfering my domains to a registrar with better customer communication, lower fees, and I'll make sure everything is set to auto-renew