The following alert was passed on to us by the Irish domain registry:

It has recently come to the attention of the IEDR that a company operating under the name “Internet Register Ireland” is in the process of contacting businesses with registered .ie domain names by post and by fax, soliciting them to register their domain name with the “Internet Register Ireland”.

The “Internet Register Ireland”, a German based company will request you to fill out their form and return it to them signed. It should be noted that they charge an excessive fee of approximately €958 for the registration of the .ie domain name in their database.

We would like to reassure all of our customers that no such organisation has been authorised to act on behalf of the IEDR. If you are contacted in this manner we would recommend that you disregard this letter completely.

We at Willows Consulting have seen this service also offered for .eu and .com domains from Spainish companies. They trade on the fact that a bill will reach a large organisation and no one will question it and simply pay out.