Domain Registry of America - DROA.COM tops it! Here’s a company that should win the ‘Biggest scam that ever existed online’. This company sends formal letters to registrants to renew their domain names, making the clients think their domains are about to expire, but in actuality, what they’re sending is a transfer request to DROA. Clients then send checks to DROA, not refundable for 3-4 weeks and transfer their domains to DROA. UPDATE: If you want your money back, the email below is another tactic to delay process for refund.
Below is an email from Damon Jacobs, from DROA.com sent to hosting company’s customers who wish to get their money back. 
******************
<customer’s name>,
We would like to take this opportunity to let you know that our company offers free web hosting with our domain name service. If you decide to renew with our firm we will give you free web hosting for the lifetime of your domain name with our firm. Our hosting package includes:
5 Gigabytes of storage
250 Gigabytes of traffic
100 email accounts
All this will be included with the payment you already supplied to renew your domain name. The payment you are making now to your hosting company (usually monthly) will be eliminated completely as long as you renew your domain name with our company. You may be saving over 75% on your annual website fees.
Please let me know how you want to proceed.
If you have any other concerns regarding this issue, please contact our toll free customer service department at 1-866-434-0212
Best regards,
Damon
Damon Jacobs [djacobs@droa.com]
******************
DROA misleads the client by saying that they currently have hosting with their existing registrar/host.
August 12th, 2009 at 11:02 pm
If you think their registry service is a scam. Try their support group! I have a client using them and I can tell you that they are fantastically incompetent, lazy, and insulting. I have been designing websites for years and writing software since 1983 and I was literally told that I was “incompetent” 3 times in a 15 min. phone call to these idiots. The ultimate irony came when I proved to them beyond any doubt that the problem was in their server configuration…They hung up on me!! Let me repeat… the DROA technical support group hung up on me.
There are probably a million registration and hosting companies on this planet. STAY CLEAR OF THESE PEOPLE, you’ll be happier for it.
As for me, I have thankfully conviced my client to let me move the site to another hosting company. We’ll deal with moving the domain name later.