I received an e-mail yesterday from someone saying they were interested in one of my domains. After a couple of e-mails either way they agreed to buy the domain for $10,000. I was real excited about this... we are moving soon and this would have taken care of all the expenses with enough left to buy a new tv.

The 'buyer' then mailed me saying that he'd need an independent appraisal and pointed me towards a supposed forum thread where he'd previously sought advice on this. The fake thread looks like this: http://domaintalk.ourplace.com/Archive/29016.htm

I ever-so-briefly considered getting the suggested appraisal... after all I could be in to make a decent profit here.

But things weren't ringing true. Why such a cheap name for this supposed domaintalk archive, why only an archive, why no links within the page to other archived threads or to the forums home page etc... A little more research and I found that this is a repetetive scam where they change the fake forum thread id, change their e-mail address and name but keep pretty much everything else the same.

So beware anyone that e-mails you offering to buy your domain and requiring that you first obtain an 'independant' appraisal. Chances are it's the same people and chances are that they own the appraisal sites.

The appraisal sites they suggested are alldomains.com and greatdomains.com
so if you are ever looking for a domain appraisal even without having received one of these bogus e-mails I'd suggest steering well clear of these sites.

Finally, on the fake forum, they suggest allfordomains.com, a site which has a specific heading for scams where you can read about scams... ooh, (thinks the un-educated user), I can check to make sure that this offer is not a scam... Sure you can - if you want to pay the scammer himself $59 to sign up for a month!