This is a story about the Company Telecom Domains Ltd, and why you should have nothing to do with them when they ring you.
They are a company that preys on the naive, and will sell website domain names for vastly inflated sums of money, while retaining the actual ownership of these domains, leaving you with nothing of any value, when you may well have paid them thousands of pounds.
I have set up this website to lay out my dealings with them, and serve as a warning to anyone else unfortunate enough to come into contact with this company.
The story begins with a phone call, made to my pensioner mother, who runs a small bed and breakfast in Kent. The call was from a salesman for Telecom Domains, who told her they would be able to help her with her website, and that they had these 'special' domain names for sale which would really help her. My mother knows nothing about websites and how they work - she's had the same mini website for years, but she's keen to get more business for the B&B, so she bought two .co.uk domain names they had.
The cost of these 2 domains was £200 (+VAT) for 2 years.
Anyone who knows anything about domain names knows that this is about 30 times more than they should have cost.
When these were about to expire, she was rung up again and asked to pay another £200 or she would lose these domains. This time they got her to buy one of the new .co domains for £100 (+ VAT) for 1 year.
So she was now paying £240 per year for 3 domains, when a reputable company would have charged her about £9.
I recently heard what was going on when she came to me and said she didn't really want to keep paying for these services any more. When I heard how much she'd been paying I nearly fell off my seat. I told her I would take this on, cancel these accounts and transfer over the domains she'd bought to a real domain company which I could manage properly.
This was the first issue. Look at their website: www.telecomdomains.co.uk - there's absolutely no customer portal to let me log in and do any admin tasks like redirecting where the domain goes, or transfer it to another company - these are standard tools for real domain hosting companies.
I mean look at their website - it's just awful.. the admin link at the bottom is this: http://www.telecomdomains.co.uk/script/index.html - it doesn't even look finished. Well at least there was a contact page, so I fired off an email requesting to provide transfer codes for the domains my mother had purchased.
No response.
I phoned them 5 times in a day. No response.
So I decided to do some research on the domains that Telecom Domains had supposedly bought for my mother.
This became interesting. The two .co.uk domains hadn't been renewed - so they had taken payment from her (of £240) and months later hadn't even renewed the domains for her!
I looked into the .co domain - this is the most recent one she'd bought and is twice as expensive. When I looked it up on whois.net, I couldn't quite believe it - instead of being registered to my mother, as would be expected, it was actually registered to, guess who? Yup. Telecom domains.
Let me just explain what this means. Telecom Domains have purchased a domain name for a few pounds. They've then pretended to sell this to my mother at a vastly inflated price, but they have retained the ownership of the domain - they've sold her nothing but a redirect from this domain to her website.
This got my blood boiling.
I decided to report them to trading standards, so I opened up a case, telling them what I'd found so far.
I also wrote this email to Telecom Domains:
RE: Domain: www.---site3---.co
You have conned my mother into 'purchasing' this domain for the last 3 years. However, it transpires she doesn't own the domain - you do.
You are uncontactable - there is no response to her emails, and no-one answers the telephone.
You have falsely indicated through invoices and other emails to her (which I have copies of) that she has purchased this domain, with you as the registrar, but she does not own the domain.
This is fraud.
I have therefore reported you to Trading standards about this as you have essentially conned her out of £360. I will be following this up with them over the next few days, and you should expect to hear something with them shortly.
The irony is that you did respond when she acted to reverse payment for this through the bank. You responded by saying it would be unfair to do that, as you had provided goods to her and you would be left out of pocket if payment was cancelled. You likened it to going to a supermarket and purchasing goods, then demanding your money back and keeping the goods. BUT, you never supplied the goods.
Further, she has two other domains:
www.---site1---.co.uk
www.---site2---.co.uk
which you have sold to her stating they would redirect to her website, but I've now discovered that you have charged for the renewal of the domains on 30th April 2013, for a 2 year period, meaning they should expire on 27/07/2015
BUT:
Looking at the domain information, these expired on 27 July 2013 and WERE NOT RENEWED.
So £220 was paid for a service that did not occur.
You can contact me on this email, or phone me on [my telephone number]. Unlike you, I do answer my phone.
Regards,
Surprisingly I did get a reply:
Good Afternoon Mr ---,
I have forwarded all confirmation to your account manager who will look into this matter for you and be in contact in due course.
We apologise if you have been receiving difficulty in getting in contact with ourselves there is a issue with our exchange.
If I can be of any further assistance in the meantime please don’t hesitate to come back to myself in the meantime.
Kind Regards
R--- L---
Customer Services Team
The next day I rechecked the whois domain registry, and discovered that Telecom Domains had been beavering away re-registering these domains, I can only suppose in the hope of covering their tracks. I decided to write them another email:
Hi R----.
I notice that since my email your team have been working to actually register the domains that had expired. If you think this is in any way going to allay my complaints I'm afraid you're mistaken. Not only is this shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but I have copies of the domain information before they were updated, showing that they had expired and not been renewed. In addition, the domain information shows when they were renewed, which is showing today, after my email to you.
I require a complete refund of:
Both the .co.uk domains 'registered' for this year, =£240
All historical costs of the .co domain (as it was never actually sold to us) = £360
And shame on you for ripping off naive people who don't know they can legitimately buy these domains for about £6 for two years. Your company is a sham.
Regards,
At this point, after a couple of "We're looking into this, honest"-type emails, Telecom Domains stopped replying to me and instead wrote directly to my mother:
Good Afternoon Mrs M-----,
I have been passed your account to investigate queries Mr M----- fetched to our attention last week.
We are unable to deal with Mr M----- regarding the queries due to him not being the account holder I’m afraid.
Having looked into the queries raised by Mr M----- it would appear that the domain names have been caught up in a server merge which has resulted in the domain names not processing properly on our auto renew system. This we are terribly sorry for and is a complete over sight due to the server merge. I have arranged with our accounts department a refund for the down time on the domain names. The refund has been worked out prorate from the date of expiry being the 27th July 2013. The domains however would have only been down from the 27th Aug 2013 when they would have been suspended on the server. We have however refunded you from the date of expiry to the 5th Sep 2013 (when the situation was rectified) in good faith. The refund being placed back on your card will be £11.23. This will be back on your card within the next 7-10 days. As form of compensation for the inconvenience caused we would like to give you a 2 year free registration on both the domain names effected www.---site1---.co.uk and www.---site2---.co.uk. This would extend your registration of both these domain names until 27th July 2017.
We apologise for any inconvenience that this may have caused you.
So they are going to refund £11! Yay, success! Hardly. I'm not stopping until they have paid back the full £600 they've tricked out of my mother. We'll get back to this. She continues:
Mr M----- however did have a further query regarding ---site3---t.co ownership. Our company registration has changed since you registered your original domains with our self. It does state in our Terms and Conditions 20.1.1 that since 29th July 2010 all domain name registration are registered and held on Telecom Domains Ltd servers and that the domain names are linked direct to your website for the duration of the registration. I have forwarded you a copy of the Terms and Conditions for your records.
I hope that this helps clear this query for you regarding the ownership.
I would like to apologise again for the inconvenience caused due to our server merge. If I can be of any further assistance regarding these matters please don’t hesitate to come back to myself.
Vicki Rogers
Customer Services Team
Hang on a second! They've decided to change their terms and conditions (Found here http://www.telecomdomains.co.uk/terms.html) so that their clients won't actually own what they're charging them for? Surely Telecom Domains should tell their clients this fact when they phone them up the next time trying to trick them out of another few hundred quid. But no, not a bit of it - they did not mention this change in their call when she first 'bought' this, nor did they mention their terms and conditions at all in any subsequent documentation, receipts or certificates they sent her after payment.
Let's put this into some sort of context about how this company is acting.
Imagine I am a naive foreigner new in London. A salesman come up to me and tells me that they can sell me a can of beans that will really help me out, and it only costs £200. Unknown to me, the salesman has a set of terms and conditions they don't tell me about that says in the small print that he will actually still own the can of beans, but I can hold it for a while.
Are these the dealings of a reputable company?
As they didn't want to talk to me any more I drafted the following email and got my mother to send it to them:
Dear Vicki,
Thank you for this information. However, I want to make it very clear to you the following points:
1) Regarding the failure of the .co.uk accounts to have been correctly re-registered: As you are in breach of contract for not making these available within an appropriate time period, we will be pursuing our claims with trading standards to get a full refund for these domains from you. Your mistake is your mistake, and the pitiful refund you have offered is unacceptable. We do not want to continue to deal with such a disreputable and unreliable company who can't even register a domain in time, and will continue to push for a full refund of these domains.
2) regarding the .co account - The letter to me (REF 002ZXHST) from Danielle Davies states: "You can see from the invoices that all the services are the same each time they have renewed nothing has changed in our service". But you have stated that your terms and conditions DID change around domain ownership during this time. Did you explicitly state this difference in the terms and conditions when you sold this domain to me? You did not. I have received nothing in writing regarding the fact that the domain is not actually mine and that I am in effect just renting it from you. This amounts to a mis-selling of goods and I will be continuing this complaint through Trading standards. Your website (Which I have taken a copy of) clearly states "How do I BUY a domain" not "how do I temporarily rent a domain off you ". It also says "Your search results will be displayed on the page and you can choose which name(s) / number(s) you would like to PURCHASE." - this is misleading and I have no doubt that trading standards will see it in the same way.
I still demand a full refund of £600 for the mis-sale of goods as detailed above.
Regards,
That's where we're currently at. Let me just end this first blog post by saying this. I will be chasing this up until Telecom Domains repay the monies tricked out of my mother in full. I will also be leaving this blog up as a warning to other people who may come into contact with this noxious company. The remit of the company is to leech off innocent people and trick them out of money, and its employees and owners should be ashamed of themselves.
Oh by the way this is Danielle Jodie Ford, Director of Telecom Domains:
She likes the movie Dirty Dancing, Swansea Football club, and ripping off pensioners.
The address of Telecom Domains is:
Telecom Domains LtdLord Arthur Rank Centre
Llanelli
Carmarthenshire
SA14 9RA
Tel: 0845 474 2807 (don't expect an answer)
Company Registration Number: 06415800 - They're a year and a half overdue on their accounts, according to Companies House.
Company Vat Number: 939 787840
