I won NHMA.com on NameJet in August of last year, and the domain name was provisioned to my Network Solutions account. In December of 2018, I transferred NHMA.com to my GoDaddy account, where I consolidate many of my domain names.
Since transferring the domain name in December, I have received a variety of email notifications from Network Solutions all trying to get me to renew NHMA.com. I have received emails with subjects like “Deactivation Notice,” “Renew Early and Save,” and “Final Renewal Notice.” Each email has different language and graphics, but ultimately, they all want me to renew this domain name and others. I counted 15 of these emails since the beginning of 2019.
This morning, I received one of the “Renew Early and Save” emails from Network Solutions:
I started sending an email to my account representative to ask him to unlock and send me the authorization code for NHMA.com. As I was typing the email, I recalled transferring the domain name to GoDaddy. A Whois lookup confirmed that NHMA.com is registered at GoDaddy and no longer registered at Network Solutions. I changed the content of my email to let my account rep know it was transferred a while back. I received a reply confirming this is a “Ghost Record” and it would be escalated to get it removed.
I did not check to see if Network Solutions would allow me to renew this domain name that was no longer registered there. Frankly, I did not feel like having to request a refund if it did go through just to test this out.
In my opinion, having “Ghost Records” at a major registrar like Network Solutions very surprising to me. I would have thought they had technology to know what domain names are registered there and what domain names are no longer registered there. The more annoying thing, from my perspective, is getting all of these emails regarding domain names that were already transferred. It is a poor customer service experience and not exactly a great confidence booster for customers considering the digital nature of domain names.
You waste time and energy on these emails…I have had a few.
I hope they fix the problem.
Thanks for highlighting.
Elliot – get used to them. You will be receiving them or quite a while…
Every/any aspect of dealing with Network Solutions is extremely difficult and frustrating.
Very sleazy company in multiple ways.
Just had one of these ghost records show up after transferring the domain out of Network Solutions. So, looks like it’s still happening 2 months later after being reported here.
I had 2 of my domains that I transferred out of NetSol last week mysteriously reappear in my account yesterday, with a “Pending Transfer” status. When I clicked on them, I got an error. Today they were gone again.