Updated November 5, 2021
A client of mine received a letter from Domain Listings LLC offering to list their website on their internet directory for 12 consecutive months for an annual fee of $228.00 USD. My client emailed me, asking if it was real or not. My gut feeling for things like this is usually no, but this prompted me to dive deep into the scam search. The important things I wanted to establish are:
- whether the website at domain-listings.org is safe to browse (and not stealing information from you or placing malignant code on your machine/device)
- if the company exists (who is Domain Listings LLC and where are they based?)
- if their offer/service is real and worth the $228.00 USD value
The Scam Search Begins
I first look to see if the website is legitimate. I visited the website that was listed in the letter, domain-listings.org, and was immediately redirected to domainlistings.directory. This isn’t an immediate red flag, as websites redirect all the time for various reasons.
The website looks like it targets customers who want a variety of services, and it provides a directory for their users to look up vendors that provide them. It appears that it’s similar to services like Yelp, Google, TripAdvisor, Yahoo!, OpenTable, etc. So it makes sense that the letter they sent out to you is to get you to sign up as a vendor. Again, it’s not a red flag, but maybe a yellow one since it has no name brand recognition like the ones I just listed off.
Is their website domain-listings.org safe to use?
I am primarily a web developer that works in digital marketing and advertising, so my next check was to see if their website was even safe.
When I first wrote this article in September 2019, my ad blockers saw nothing. Not a single one. That told me they werent’ really into tracking their digital traffic, so they either didn’t care if you visited their website because it’s only reason for existence was to appear legit for the purpose of the letter, or they hadn’t a clue on how digital marketing works.
Even something as simple as a page view tracker is important for analytics if your website’s primary goal is to help users find local services. But again, this leds me to believe that that wasn’t their primary goal, and that their primary goal is scamming you. This is another yellow flag since it isn’t blatantly bad and could easily just be the result of bad marketing.
Howevever, upon revisiting their website in November 2021, I saw they added Google Analytics 4 submitting data to G-YNLQQ8J96L. So they at least now know if you visit and engage with their website.
While viewing their website, it asked me for my location, which I denied. This is common when using the Google Maps API. I wanted to know why it wanted my location, so I took a peek at the source code.
The page already looked up my IP address but if I had given it consent to retrieve my exact location, it would’ve shipped my data off to something called geolocation_cache (which could do anything). Other than that, there is nothing in the success function. See for yourself.
<script type="text/javascript">
$(window).load(function(){
if(navigator && navigator.geolocation) {
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(
function(position) {
$.ajax({
data: ({
action: 'geolocation_cache',
ip: "I_BLANKED_OUT_MY_IP_ADDRESS",
latitude: position.coords.latitude,
longitude: position.coords.longitude
}),
success: function() {}
});
},
function() {},
{timeout:10000}
);
}
});
</script>This is a red flag for me because they are making it look like that they’ve built a fancy website that uses your location data to find “popular destinations” near you automatically. Except it doesn’t. It does absolutely nothing for you on the client-side but it takes that data and does something with it on the server-side where we can’t see.
So if you are a user of their website or you visited it to check its legitimacy after receiving the letter yourself, you’re probably safe to continue browsing it, as in you didn’t get a virus. I’d just be leery of its content and would always ensure your browser’s settings are set to “ask” when requesting your location.
Aside from that, the vendor ratings are user-generated; and like a bad science experiment, it’s probably got a small sample size.
Are they marketing themselves to actual customers and not just vendors?
I believe this is an important question to answer. After checking out their website and getting a general idea of what their business is about, having vendors in their online directory is just one facet. The customers that use the website to find vendors are the other, and for everyone to be successful, they should be marketing their primary product—this “internet directory” to that audience.
I ran an SEO report on their website to check their SEO efforts in organic traffic. It actually didn’t do too poorly. Most importantly though, I was looking to see if the website was even indexable by search engines. If it wasn’t, then that means that not only did they not put any effort into obtaining organic traffic, but that they actually put effort into hiding their website and preventing organic traffic, and that would’ve been a major red flag.
However, their homepage was indexable, and they even had a sitemap, so it seems okay-ish. I’m not convinced at any rate.
There are some other yellow flags that could be a result of poor SEO efforts, like not having any h1 elements on the page. There is a lot of room for optimization and if this is really their job, then they should be all over this. Maybe I did convince myself that this yellow flag is a red flag.
Does this offer have any value to you?
Considering you’ve never heard of “Domain Listings”, it’s likely your customers haven’t either. If you’re trying to get new customers, you want to reach them through avenues that they’d take to search for you, and that’s likely through more popular search engines and directories, not this unknown platform.
Most search engines have free tools for adding your company to their results. The tools I use for checking your online presence within online directories only look in Google Search, Google Maps, Facebook, Yelp, Bing, Foursquare, Factual, Hotfrog, us-info, ShowMeLocal, and Navmii because that is what people will likely use. I haven’t even heard of the last four, but you’d only want to spend your advertising dollars where it makes sense for your business.
With that said, I believe Domain Listing’s offer won’t make a dent in helping you get more business. It’s a waste of money, even if it was real.
Does “Domain Listings LLC” actually exist?
I did a generic Google search for the company, and despite my feelings that the Better Business Bureau (BBB) is also just a waste of money these days, there are a lot of complaints on this company that it’s a scam due to its misleading advertising with this exact letter for the exact same reasons. In fact, there were many hits in my Google search results that this was a scam. Now, this was a huge red flag!
I next looked into the registration records for the website’s two domain names. According to WHOIS, domain-listings.org was registered in March 2013, but many blog articles that talk about this letter span between 2016 and 2018. This makes sense that the scam likely started around 2016 since the WHOIS listing for domainlistings.directory states it was was registered in June 2016. Their contact information was kept private in both WHOIS listings (which I recommend to everyone to do, especially if you’re a small business that operates out of your home like me), so that lead became a dead end.
I then got a little more technical. I pinged both domains.
When I first wrote this article, their IP addresses both responded from 72.5.53.15, which is roughly located in Seattle, Washington, USA, however in November 2021, only domain-listings.org still responded with that IP address. The site it redirects to, domainlistings.directory actually replied with 104.153.109.171 and that is located in Los Angeles, California.
IP lookup isn’t the greatest method for geolocation (which is why their site asks your browser for your location even after they have our IP address with or without consent).
According to their website and letter, they are located in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, so close enough to only raise another yellow flag. The phone number listed on both of their website and letter use the 702 area code, which serves Las Vegas.
In the letter, it says their company name is “Domain Listings LLC”. All LLCs must be registered with a state (you can find mine in Pennsylvania by searching for “Tessa Watkins”), so I attempted to look it up in several states on the west coast, starting with Nevada. I didn’t find anything in 2018, but when I looked again in 2021, I did see it listed in the system with entity number “E0185052014-7”, formed on April 8, 2014, and lists Michael Felling as the managing member and Bill Havre as the commercial registered agent.
So at least they exist.
A Brief Financial History
In 2019, the Get Out of Debt Guy Steve Rhode tackled this topic too.
Rhode did a quick search for law suits filed in Las Vegas against Domain Listings LLC and found a case filed by Eco Electric LLC that resulted in a default judgement for $31,879.00 USD against Domain Listings LLC and Sanders Construction Group LLC (pdf).
In Conclusion
Their website site appeared legitimate. Poorly managed, but legitimate. No search engine would flag their website as a scam as they covered all of their basic technical bases for making the site searchable. Their website is basic in terms of marketing and advertising efforts. After all of this digging, I feel like their website just exists to help convince you, the vendor, that they’re real and that their offer is a good one. Their business, also likely to be focused more on obtaining money from vendors through sketchy marketing than providing their primary product, the “internet directory”, to everyday people, is also definitely fake. Shred the letter and save your money—”Domain Listings” is a scam.
