Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say. Scammers, in particular, are great believers in imitation. The first 419'ers spawned hundreds of others. Money transfer scams, with their higher barriers to entry (to work a money transfer scam, you have to either come up with a plausible fake check or a phish'ed bank account), are rarer, but there are probably at least ten separate money-transfer scam operators currently fishing for victims by email. The 'fake storefront' scam popularized by this scammer has now been picked up by a different scammer. And so on.

A perennial favorite is the 'looks-like-an-invoice' trick, where someone sends you something that looks like an invoice for your domain registration in the hope that you'll pay it without noticing that whoever sent it has no business sending you any such thing. Domain Registry of America, perhaps the best known exponent of this practice got their knuckles rapped in court and since then DRoA and their imitators (Domain Listing Center, Domain Renewal, etc.) have been more cautious, taking care to cover their messages with small print and disclaimers and even writing "this is not an invoice" in big letters on their forms - which, curiously, continue to look very much like invoices). The senders of this type of message will naturally argue that they are not running a scam at all, pointing out that they state quite clearly what they are selling and take pains to stress that you aren't required to renew with them or to pay for their 'listing services'. Nevertheless, it's hard to look at their not-quite-invoices without words like 'intent to deceive' coming to mind.

Domain Name Wire reports a new scam with some similar characteristics. Here, the 'faux invoice' is replaced by an official-looking notice advising you that your website is "now available for copyright registration" and hinting that if you don't at once register with the 'US Copyright Registry' (i.e. the scammer), someone else might 'register the copyright', with dire consequences. Their message reads in part:

You are required to advise the US Copyright Registry of your intent to license this website if registration is administered through the UCR as this is your final notice.

Again, the scammer is counting on you only reading the words 'required to advise' and 'final notice', and firing off a check to them in a panic. In this respect it resembles the faux-invoice scams, where the goal is to get you to focus on what the message appears to be, rather than what is actually written on it.

Nothing, as yet, links this scammer to any other known operations. However, they do share nameservers with an education lead-generator that makes a practice of registering domains whose names echo those of prestigious educational institutions. Coincidence, or a case of birds of a feather flocking together?