Nevertheless, it’s worth a read to educate yourself on how these scams work — and to read the stories of serial scammers Bradley Norrish, Chesley Rafferty and others.

The scams take two general forms:

Looking like an invoice for domain registration renewal, when they’re not — they’re only offering to “facilitate” the renewal, which is how they can get in earlier than auDA’s 90-day rule.
Offering to register — sorry, “facilitate registration of” — a .com domain, when your registered domain is actually .com.au. Many people confuse the two when speaking, and don’t realise they’re completely different.

Both versions of the scam usually charge renewal fees way above the going rate. For example, one scammer was recently offering to register a .com domain for $275 per year when the going rate is around $25.

And, even if they actually do renew the name, they often lock you into a registration regime which is difficult to extract yourself from.

Like most such things, the scammers wouldn’t do it if it weren’t profitable for them. The way to stop them is through education (to reduce the number of “customers”) and through lobbying The Authorities to allocate more resources to prosecuting them.