Domains by Proxy (DBP) are a bunch of crooks. I signed up for domains through godaddy.com and opted for the add-on privacy which automatically creates an account with DBP. However, I never received additional information with account #'s or passwords to access the privacy account. Why would I need to? Well, as I continued to renew my domain and realized the cost was doubling as a result of privacy, I contacted GoDaddy to drop the privacy. They told me I could only do that online with DBP and that I needed to request a ?change of email address? on my account since I had changed my email account when I first obtained the domain names and privacy. GoDaddy could not provide me my DBP account #, so I emailed DBP who demanded a copy of my government ID. I faxed them a copy and they told me it was not of sufficient quality. So, I went to Kinko's and had them scan it as a jpg and I sent that to them. Then, they demanded a business license for the business on record. The problem was that I never established a business for these domain names and I explained this to DBP. (Of course all of this correspondence was via email because that?s the only way ?account services? will communicate with you.) DBP would only continually reply to my emails that I needed to check my emailed receipt from the original order (8 years ago) for the account information. I also emailed them that if there was a business on my account, it was done fraudulently or somebody made an error. They just continued to send me the same form letter response to check my emailed receipts. They obviously were not reading the body of my messages.
Since that was an old email address from 8+ years ago, and I don?t have access to those email records, I located a phone # online for DBP. When I called, I was connected to sales/support. The guy who helped me was ?John? and was very helpful. However, he did not have access to my records in this department and although he tried several people to help me, he was unsuccessful. He spoke to account services on my behalf but they refused to talk to me on the phone. They only told him I needed to email them, but they had been ignoring my previous claims of fraud activity on my account.
Finally, John told me a work-around that might work. He told me that DBP uses the same password as my GoDaddy account. In addition, he told me that if I started the ordering process of adding privacy to one of my other domain names, it would show me my full account #. I did this, and sure enough it was correct and I was able to access my account with my godaddy account #.
If it were not for this DBP employee who bent the rules and told me a work-around to their BS customer service, they could have continually held me hostage paying their ridiculous fees in an effort to maintain ownership of my domain name. They make the process of retrieving account information so difficult, they only way to stop your privacy payments to DBP is to cancel your domain name. Of course, somebody else then has the ability to purchase your domain name from under you. Never again will I use their privacy service.
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