GoDaddy seems to have spent considerable sums of money on Google Adwords to advertise domain registration coupon codes. A year or two ago, GoDaddy pretty much stopped issuing coupons to register domain names at below wholesale cost.
Joe Styler, ‎Aftermarket Product Manager at GoDaddy, posted a warning on NamePros about a GoDaddy coupon scam that was brought to his attention. Although he mentioned the NamePros connection, it is important to understand that something like this can happen on any venue or even via spam email targeting domain owners. Here’s how Joe described this coupon scam:
“Someone on NamePros posts or advertises in their signature that they can register domains for you at GoDaddy cheaply, say for $3.99 or so per .com. Or they offer to register it for you for less than the price of normal registration which with the Domain Discount Club is currently, $8.37. You pay them directly and they register the domain name for you and then push it to your account. Everything seems great until a few days later our fraud department repossesses the domain name from your account and you cannot get the domain name back or your money back from the people who offered to buy you the domain for less than cost. This is if you even get the domain name in the first place.”
Joe mentioned that the only consistent way to save money on domain registrations is by signing up for GoDaddy’s Domain Discount Club.
I would imagine GoDaddy offers domain registration coupons from time to time, but they are generally limited in nature and would involve the buyer registering domain names on his or her own.
Thanks to Joe for chiming in on this issue.
Thanks Elliot for bringing this to people’s attention. I would like to point out that I had a typo on the Namepros post which I could not go back and edit when I saw it. The .com price is $8.47 not $8.37 with the domain discount club. I accidentally hit the wrong key when typing. 🙂
Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
I happened to register 30 domains for $3 per domain without coupons about 2 years back, having read it somewhere, when I first started out.
Thereafter, I discovered that the technique was not right. Spoke to Blake Irving(GoDaddy CEO) regarding the issue, produced the proof etc.
The team finally seemed to have worked to catch the fraud. Earlier in those days, as per my experience, they couldn’t catch the fraudulent registration.
I’d be more concerned about Domain Forums running scams, screwing newbies out of hundreds and even thousands of dollars, and yet were discussing up to $9 what a Registrar charges? LOL… Your priorities are once again in the wrong place.