[registrars] RE: Deleting domain names to obtain a refund of more than 1 year

["Gomes, Chuck" <cgomes@verisign.com>]

Bhavin,

This is an issue that we in VGRS have been empathetic to for some time.
While recognizing that VGRS has no visibility into the registrant arena and
therefore no control over registrant fraud, Rusty, Ben and I are all three
very supportive of providing some relief in this area under certain
conditions, but we still have some selling to do within the company.  We
tried last fall and did not succeed but we have not given up. Ben and I
recently received some additional evidence that might give us a stronger
case so we will be working it further.

Chuck

-----Original Message-----
From: Bhavin Turakhia [mailto:bhavin.t@directi.com]
Sent: Saturday, February 08, 2003 3:23 AM
To: 'Registrar Constituency'
Cc: 'Chuck Gomes'
Subject: Deleting domain names to obtain a refund of more than 1 year


Hi,

There was a discussion earlier about the risk that we as registrars bear
when payment for domain names chargeback due to fraudulent transactions.
I have taken a consolidated history of all my cc transactions and
determined that we are making a loss on all cc transactions due to the
chargeback transactions.

Today there was another chargeback on a 5 year domain name. I figure
from my costing that each 5 year domain name that charges back, we have
to sell around 120-150 domain years to recuperate that loss. Despite
EXPENISVE manual fraud detection processes, we still cannot reduce
fraudulent transactions to less than 2%. This ensures that we are always
in a Loss in our cc transactions.

* This discourages us from using CC Transactions as a payment mode
* Increases our processing time and headaches for fraud detection
* Inflates our costs dramatically

Verisign (and the other Registries) need to come up with a refund of the
remaining years on a domain name. So if a 5 year domain is deleted, I
need to atleast obtain a refund on 4 years worth of money. This is a
standard anywhere else in the industry. If a servic is not rendered it
does not make sense paying for it.

More than the above statement that I make it is important that the
Registries put in this feature to allow us Registrars to minimise our
fraud losses, and thus be comfortable in offering credit card payments.
This is quite an easy feature to build in to the current system.

I am assuming that since it is affecting us - it should be affecting
various other registrars to a similar extent

Best Regards
Bhavin Turakhia
Founder, CEO & Chairman
Directi
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Fax: 91-22-26370255
http://www.directi.com
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