Went from zero phishing emails to 30 a day after buying a domain last month

Honestly, I grabbed a cheap domain for a side project and within 48 hours my inbox was flooded with fake invoices and password reset scams. Has anyone else seen a massive spike in spam right after registering a new domain?

3 comments

3 Comments

carr.luna4d agoMost Upvoted

Wait, are you talking about WHOIS privacy? Because when you register a domain, your contact info is usually in the public WHOIS database by default unless you pay for privacy protection. That's probably what's causing the spam, not the domain itself. I learned the hard way when I skipped the privacy option once and got hit with a flood of domain renewal scam emails within a week. Just something to double check on your registrar settings.

logan2714d ago

Yeah that actually makes a lot of sense, I used to think WHOIS was the main culprit for spam too but @adam186 has a point about website scraping being just as bad if not worse. Kinda changes things for me, I might look closer at my contact page next time instead of just blaming the domain registry.

adam1864d ago

I actually see it the other way. WHOIS privacy has been mandatory for years under GDPR and a lot of registrars just include it for free now. The spam I got was from people scraping websites, not the database. They just look at your contact page or use a tool to find the email in the HTML. I'd check if there's a contact form on your domain's site or if you listed an email anywhere public.