RunCabin Blog · For new owners

I got a letter saying my domain is expiring. Is it a scam?

September 28, 2026 · 7 min read

It arrives in a windowed envelope and looks like a bill. Across the top it says something like "Domain Name Expiration Notice." Your business domain is printed on it, spelled exactly right. There is an expiration date, a price for one, two, or five more years, and a line warning that if you let it lapse, you could lose your website and your email.

If you just started a business, this can be genuinely alarming. You probably bought the domain months ago, you do not remember where, and now it sounds like the whole thing is about to disappear. Before you write a check, here is what that letter almost always is, how to check in about two minutes, and what to do if you already paid it.

The short answer: it is usually not from the company that holds your domain

Most paper "renewal notices" for domains are not sent by your registrar, the company you actually bought the domain from. They are sent by a different company that wants you to move your domain to them. The letter is written to look like a routine renewal, but paying it does not renew anything where your domain lives now. It starts a transfer, usually to a company charging several times what a domain normally costs.

For comparison, a typical .com renews for somewhere around $10 to $25 a year at the big mainstream registrars. If the letter wants a lot more than that, or pushes a multi-year package "to save," that alone is a strong tell.

The giveaway is often in the fine print. Read the small text near the bottom or on the back. Many of these letters admit, in a sentence you are not meant to notice, that this is a solicitation, that it is not a bill, or that you are under no obligation to pay.

This is an old trick, and regulators have gone after it

There is even a name for it in the domain world: domain slamming. The Federal Trade Commission took a company called Domain Registry of America to court in 2003, alleging that its mass-mailed notices looked like renewal notices from people's current registrars and warned their domains were about to expire, when paying them actually moved the domain to a different registrar. The case ended in a court order barring the misleading notices and requiring refunds.

A cousin of the scheme showed up in a 2010 FTC case against an operation calling itself Internet Listing Service, which mailed small businesses bills for an annual "website address listing" that looked like they came from the business's own registrar. According to the FTC, most people who paid got nothing, and the court ordered the defendants to pay more than $4.2 million.

Those cases are years old, and the letters kept coming anyway. The names on the letterhead change. The playbook does not.

How did they even get my address?

When you register a domain, your contact details go into a public registration record known as WHOIS. Many registrars now hide those details by default with privacy protection, but not all do, and older domains or domains registered by a web designer may have your name and address sitting in the open. On top of that, new business filings are public record in most states. Mailers buy or scrape both, which is why a brand-new owner can get one of these within weeks of registering.

So the letter is not a sign that anything is wrong with your domain. It is a sign you are on a list. It is the paper version of the website and SEO sales calls that start the day you register a business.

How to check in two minutes

You do not have to guess. Here is how to know for sure who holds your domain and when it really expires:

1. Find your real registrar. Search your email for the words "domain" and "receipt" or "order," around the time you set up the business. The company on that receipt is your registrar. If you cannot find it, look your domain up at lookup.icann.org. It is a free lookup run by ICANN, the nonprofit that oversees domain names, and it shows the registrar's name and the expiration date.
2. Compare names. If the company on the letter is not the registrar you just found, the letter is a pitch, not a bill. You can recycle it.
3. Log in the safe way. Go to your registrar by typing its address into your browser yourself. Never use a link, QR code, or phone number printed on the letter or in the email.
4. Check two settings. Look at the real expiration date and make sure auto-renew is on with a card that is not about to expire. While you are there, confirm the domain is locked against transfers. Most registrars turn this on by default; it takes one click if not.

That is it. If all four check out, the letter has no power over you.

The other versions of the same pitch

The paper letter is the classic, but the same idea shows up in a few other forms. Knowing them saves you a panic later:

• The "your domain is expiring" email with a login button. This one is often worse than the letter. Instead of trying to move your domain, it tries to steal your registrar password with a fake login page. Same rule: never log in from the email. Go to the registrar yourself.
• The "search engine listing" invoice. It lists your domain and a yearly fee for "submission" or "listing" so you show up in search. Google does not charge to be included in search results, and nobody needs to "submit" your site for a fee.
• The overseas "someone wants your name" email. It claims another company has applied to register your business name in a foreign domain ending, and offers to reserve it for you first, for a price. It is a sales tactic. For a local plumber or painter, foreign domain endings are not something you need.
• The official-looking business filing mailer. Not about domains, but same family: letters offering to file your LLC's annual report or get a "certificate" for a fee far above what the state charges. Many state business-filing offices warn about these on their own websites. File directly with your state.

I already paid it. Now what?

Do not beat yourself up. These letters are designed by people who do this full time. Move quickly, though:

• Call your card company or bank and dispute the charge. Tell them it was a deceptive solicitation made to look like an invoice. The sooner you call, the better your odds.
• Log in to your real registrar and make sure the domain is locked. If you get an email asking you to approve a domain transfer, do not approve it. In most cases a transfer also needs an authorization code from your current registrar, which is one reason some of these never go through. Do not count on that, though. Lock it and watch your inbox.
• Cancel in writing with the company you paid, and keep a copy.
• Report it. You can report it to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. If the company is an accredited domain registrar, you can also file a complaint with ICANN.

If the domain did end up moved, your registrar's support team has handled this before. Call them, explain what happened, and ask how to get it back.

The real danger is the opposite: a domain that actually expires

Here is the part that matters more than any scam letter. The most common way a small business loses its domain is not a fake notice. It is a real one that nobody saw. The domain was registered years ago by a web designer, a nephew, or a former partner, under their account and their email. The real renewal reminders went to them. Then the card on file expired, and one morning the website and the business email both stop working.

If you are not sure whose name and email your domain is under, that is worth fixing this week. We wrote a full guide on it: my web guy disappeared, how do I get control of my own website? The short version: the domain should be in your name, on an account you can log in to, with auto-renew on and reminders going to an email you actually check.

Where RunCabin fits

This is one of the quieter reasons owners like having their website handled in one place. With RunCabin's done-for-you websites, your domain is included in the flat $39.99/mo, along with the site, hosting, and professional email. No setup fee, no contract, no lead fees. We keep the domain renewed while you are with us, so there is no separate renewal date for you to track and no card on some forgotten registrar account to expire.

That also makes the junk mail easy to sort. Your only bill is the RunCabin subscription on the card you signed up with. We never mail paper renewal notices, so any letter asking you to "renew" your domain is not from us, and you can toss it. And if you ever leave, your domain goes with you: we release it to you with the transfer code, no hostage domains.

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Related reading: why you get so many website and SEO sales calls · how to choose a domain name · getting control of your website back