DNS Services Scam | Scammers Try to Bill You for DNS Services

The DNS Services Scam

The DNS Services Scam is aimed at small businesses that have their own websites. A company called DNS Services is sending a ‘bill’ for about $65 for a year for “DNS services.” See the paragraph below for an explanation of what DNS really is. Here is my advice: do not pay this ‘bill,’ do not call the company – just throw the ‘bill’ away. It states in a paragraph in the middle of the statement that it is a solicitation for services and not a bill. Interesting that it looks just like a bill for services!

This is very similar to the old telephone directory scam from years past where a strange looking bill from a company you never heard of shows up in your business mailbox asking money for services you never requested. What it does say in small print near the bottom of the page is that it is merely a solicitation for telephone advertising services and not really a bill. However, it looks a lot like a bill and a lot of people probably paid it thinking they owed that money.

Here is the explanation of DNS: All websites have numbers associated with them (also called IP addresses) and when you go to a website you are actually going to an IP address, not the domain name. This is because computers only know how to talk in numbers, not names, so they need a translator to tell them exactly where to go. That is what DNS (Domain Name Service) does – it tells your computer the IP address of the website and then your browser can go there. This service is provided by all kinds of DNS servers on the Internet – your Internet provider has them, web host providers have them, government agencies have them, businesses can have them, even Google has them (Google’s DNS server is 8.8.8.8 in case you wanted to know)!

So you can see that DNS is a real thing and it is necessary for the Internet to work. DNS is provided automatically to you through your web host provider (where your website is hosted) which populates all of the DNS servers around the world whenever you get a new domain or your IP address changes on a domain you currently own. Those DNS servers then translate the IP addresses for computers that make the requests (such as your own personal or business computer, or even your smartphone) so your computer or smartphone can find the web address you requested. DNS servers are usually provided by your Internet Service Provider; the settings are seamless to you – you never need to know that it is there – but it is. If you like, you can always change the DNS server on your computer to any valid DNS server address (such as Google’s DNS Server that I listed above).

I hope this explains why you do not need to pay the DNS Services bill and you know a little more about how the Internet works! Please feel free to contact us at anytime through our contact form if you have any further questions. Thanks for reading!