RegisterFly, RegFly Domain Name Registration Company are Thieves

RegisterFly has been re branded as RegFly, from my research it’s the same people that was behind RegisterFly and when you go to registerfly.com your redirected to regfly.com.

Log in to RegFly with the same user name and password you had for RegisterFly and you get to see a list of domains that got transferred to Godaddy and eNom. Until a week ago when I logged in to RegFly I had a $320 balance that I had left over from my RegisterFly account.

So RegFly = RegisterFly, there is no doubt that this is the same company.

Like I mentioned above, a week ago RegFly had $320 of my money I’ve been trying to recover for months. In June 2008 I threatened to ruin their RegFly relevant SERPS through SEO means (I’m a very good SEO consultant, so it’s not an idle threat) giving them a deadline to refund my $320 by the evening of Monday June 16th or I’ll start my negative SEO campaign against the RegFly SERPs. Tried to log in to my RegFly account to read the support ticket response and the account has been suspended.

Sent an email to risk@regfly.com but it bounced, tried other addresses, but I’ve had enough, it’s time to destroy their RegFly SERPs.

Original RegisterFly/RegFly Article

Registerfly (now called RegFly) was the first domain names registration company I used for cheap domain names beyond the sort of service where you pay a hosting company to host/register your domain (they do everything).

Registerfly domain registration was cheap, had a very good interface/set of domain registration tools and was reasonably easy to use and so before the problems that resulted in ICANN Termination of RegisterFly.com (now RegFly.com) Registrar Accreditation Agreement in March 2007 I’d purchased over 70 domains with them and had used my credit card on many occasions to add funds to my Registerfly domain registration account so my domains would be renewed for a year or two without having to make manual credit card payments (figured I’d be with Registerfly for years).

I’d not kept track of Registerfly/RegFly as a domain name registration company (I have no interest past buying cheap domain names from them when it comes to domain registration companies) and so had no idea they were having problems until they affected my domains.

First problems that hit me was with .co.uk domains (which happened to be my most important sites) wasn’t being renewed quickly by Registerfly and in one case one .co.uk domain was almost transferred to someone else by mistake!! Because of this some of my sites had several days downtime which cost me revenue and Google SERPs! I also had the wrong registration info on many of my sites whois info which caused problems with Nominet (had a domain suspended for a week or so for having the wrong info!).

Registerfly ICANN Termination of Registrar Accreditation Agreement

To cut a long story short :-) after Registerfly/RegFly lost registrar accreditation about half the domains got transferred to Godaddy and the rest to eNom. I’d been using Godaddy for a while as well since I buy domains from their domain auctions and so had no problem with the domains that went to Godaddy. The eNom ones however I wasn’t happy about, eNom registration company charges way too much for renewals and so I set out to transfer all domains to Godaddy and 123-reg.co.uk since Godaddy doesn’t deal with .co.uk domains!

You can read about my eNom problems at eNom Domain Thieves.

For some reason this left two domains (.co.uk ones) with Registerfly/RegFly, one fortunately still worked, (could access the site via a browser and my site was visible) but one didn’t work (nothing online). I had to pay through Nominet to get them transferred from Registerfly since their support staff at the time either ignored tickets (closing them without responding) or didn’t answer the actual questions/problems. After weeks I eventually regained control of both domains.

You’d think that would be the end of the Registerfly saga, but no I’m never that lucky. Unfortunately this left over $300 in funds (paid in using my credit card) in my now empty Registerfly account!

I’ve asked on half a dozen tickets to RegFly, sent emails requesting a refund to my credit card and the one response I’ve got is-

Thank you for contacting our support department. Unfortunately we cannot assist with this request. We do not refund quick checkout balances. You may use the balance in your account on any product or service that we offer. This policy is without exception. Thank you

Senior Client Care
Registerfly.com

This can’t be legal (can it?), they can’t withhold my money!

I’m trying one more ticket to try to get a refund on my credit card and then I’m going to my credit card company to start chargeback proceedings. I don’t want to do this, but I’m not going to leave over $300 with this domain name registration company when I have no intentions of ever using their domain name registration services again (they suck).

This will probably mean issuing credit card chargebacks for over the amount they owe since it’s highly unlikely I made a credit card payment that exactly matches the amount owed by Registerfly and I expect to get ALL my money back.

If anyone else has had this problem with credit card quick checkout balances with Registerfly I’d appreciate a comment if you managed to get your money back.

If your using Registerfly/RegFly still (your a fool :-)) do not add funds to your account as they refuse to refund them.