hamner

Two days ago, I registered three URLs with Name.com. Yesterday, I woke up to find the URLs available / redirected to spam pages, and when I tried to log on, I received the message "account is closed." I had received no email from Name.com about this, and emailed their support. Here is the email exchange:

-----From me, 2:40 PM

To whom it may concern,

I registered an account (-----) and purchased three domain names (----.com, ----.org, ----.net) yesterday.

Today, when I tried signing into name.com, I got the following error message: "Error: Invalid login (account is closed)."

There is no reason my account should be closed. Please fix this.

Best regards,

-----9 Hours later, from Name.com Thank you for contacting Name.com. It appears that the credit card ending in "----" that was used in your transaction to register three domains has been blacklisted from Name.com by our fraud department. Please send us a scan of this credit card and government issued ID that is associated with the credit card. Once we have this documentation, we will be happy to provide you with assistance in registering your desired domains.

Thank you for choosing Name.com! Please feel free to contact us with any other questions you may have in the future.

-----

About an hour before receiving a reply, I decided to re-register the domains with namecheap.com. (I was not going to do business with a registrar that arbitrarily locked my account and freed my URLs). Registration went fine, but for some reason my account was marked as potentially fraudulent by namecheap.com as well. Here is how namecheap.com handled it:

-----From namecheap.com:

Hello,

Unfortunately, your Namecheap account was flagged by our fraud screening system and was locked.

Please provide us with the following details to get your account verified:

- a color photo quality copy of your identification (passport/government issued photo ID) sent as attachment in .pdf format; - your phone number and the best time to call you (within normal business hours, US Pacific time) so we will be able to discuss this.

If we do not hear back from you within 24 hours we will be forced to cancel your orders.

Looking forward to your reply.

-----From me:

Hi ----,

Attached is a copy of my ----. I am currently in Switzerland, which is 9 hours ahead of US Pacific time. My US number is +1-###-###-####, and my Swiss phone number is +41-##-###-##-##. The best time to call me is between 8am and noon tomorrow PST.

Why was my account flagged?

Best regards,

-----From namecheap.com:

Hello ----,

Thank you for the papers provided, your Namecheap account has been unlocked and marked as legitimate so it will never happen to you again.

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience it caused you.