I occasionally receive text messages with various offers that seem to want me to believe they are from GoDaddy or affiliated with the company. After I received a text message that mentioned GoDaddy this past week, I reached out to GoDaddy’s Nick Fuller to ask if it was from GoDaddy. As I suspected, the message was not sent by GoDaddy.
Here’s the content of a text message I received:
“Congrats! You are Selected for 70% Off Godaddy Business Video Deal Ending Today! Click Here (redacted Bitly link) Now to Activate this Deal & Boost your Sales by 300%.
I didn’t click the link, so I have no idea what url is being promoted. I would also advise others who receive such messages to not click the link either. Because of the masked Bitly url that was used, I have no idea what the endgame for this text message is.
Nicole Cox, VP of Customer Engagement at GoDaddy, commented to me about the text message spam:
“GoDaddy has no relationship with the group that is sending these messages. GoDaddy does not condone sending of text messages to customers that have not explicitly requested to receive them.”
I don’t recall ever receiving a text message from GoDaddy, besides the ones I receive for two factor authentication.
As with all types of marketing efforts that are purportedly from registrars (phone calls, emails, or text messages), you need to be totally sure it is the company or you could put your domain names or other private information at risk.
I clicked through. Took me to route66d.com
Did you get the same text, or was it different? What was there?
i get this on nearly a daily basis. godaddy should try and sue those behind it.
I get the same text message 3x per week
Obviously it was not sent by Godaddy. I get these about 3 times a week. They use your whois information and will send sms from different numbers. I have tried to block them but they get a new bumber each times!
Now, don’t tell me whois privacy protection is bad for domaining!
Whenever I get spam email I forward it to the company so they can terminate the affiliate relationship from the spammers. Hard to spam affiliate links when I’ve destroyed the spammers partner relationships that pay them. When you spend many thousands at a company each year they’ll listen to ya as I’ve gotten affiliate partnerships cancelled and even website hosting accounts banned damn near instantly.
If the company isn’t sending them they may be open to peep text message to see affiliate tracking in it as well.
I have gotten 5 of these in the last 24 hours. So annoying!!!
Same here, GoDaddy no longer cares about customer service:
“One of our representatives will be with you shortly. You are number 39 in the queue. Thank you for your patience.”
I find the timing of these text messages incredibly coincidental. I just signed up for a paid godaddy service and within 24 hours, I received 15 emails and 2 text messages mentioning godaddy by name. I don’t even have a website up yet and I am not registered in the WhoIs directory as of yet. GoDaddy claims that this is not them sending through the email/texts. If it is not, then I feel that my name, email and phone number have been sold. There is no way that a spammer can get that much information in under 24 hours.
I don’t see what the benefit to GoDaddy would be, and there would be massive public backlash if it were true. My guess is that your info is in the Whois listing right now and people are harvesting that for new registrations. You can goto Verisign’s (.com registry operator) Whois tool to see: https://www.verisign.com/en_US/domain-names/whois/index.xhtml
Godaddy doesn’t give a hoot about us, wouldn’t know the meaning of customer service and is only too happy to aid and abet spammers. This idiot spammer first registered domain with enom – after complaining for over a year, domain cancelled so spammer moved to namecheap who responded their client has a right to keep their information private while he continued to bombard us with 10 – 12 spams daily. So we kept forwarding those spams with profanity laced messages. The spammer now has moved to Godaddy who were only too happy to register this stupid domain under their P.O. Box so they could protect this POS spammer’s iID who by the way is based in Tanger. And wildwestdomains also owned by Godaddy happy to host this POS domain. We have been complaining for the last 5+ months but who cares – we just receive spam responses … keep internet safe, incident report, yada, yada, yada.