WA newbies, beware of scammers!
If you are new to affiliate marketing or website building and are coming into this business as a clean slate, BEWARE of registering your domain in any other website other than WA.
I purchased my domain at GoDaddy and did not realize that the personal information that they require for me to actually buy the domain is published for everyone to see! Name, address, phone number, email, EVERYTHING!! And you have to pay in order to make your account private. I did NOT know that!
I received a call from some people saying that they were website developers from Wealthy Affiliate that wanted to review my website. I thought it was suspicious at first, but they were good at making it seem legit. They said they were going to review my website and offer me ideas on how I could improve it and make more money out of it. I told them that I wasn't aware that WA offered that service, and they said, "Sure, it's part of the WA package".
They asked me what my plans were for my website, as well as my income goals. Then they said that in order to help me financially plan for my website they needed to know my debt to income ratio, my credit score, how many credit cards I had, what banks did I have those cards with, etc. They did NOT ask for my SS#, credit card info or anything like that.
There were about three or four of them that took turns speaking with me. They were all very friendly and very professional. One was the financial planner, another was the website developer, another was something else... I don't know...
Then when the person I spoke to finished asking me all of his questions, he said that he was going to sit with his design team to come up with some ideas to share with me and would call me back within the next 30 to 40 minutes. Hours went by and I never heard back from them. I still haven't heard back from them.
I was left confused and I was kicking myself in the behind because I fell into that trap. I'm so good at keeping myself from those kinds of situations. How did I get into this one? That's when I decided to ask the question in WA, and of course this wonderful WA community immediately shared their knowledge with me....
Kyle graciously answered the following:
KylePremium Ambassadorabout 5 hours ago
Total scam!! This is in no way related to us and they are able to get your contact details because you have not registered your domain privately (another reason you want to use the domain registration here at wa which blocks stuff like this). Avoid anything like this, we will never call you or solicit anything to you.
.... and he went further to advise....
KylePremium Ambassadorabout 3 hours ago
The next call was likely going to lead into some sort of promotion or them asking you how much money you have, offering you some service, etc.
Moving forward register all of your domains here through our SiteDomains platform as all of your information (contact details) is hidden from people when you register domains here.
https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/websites/domains
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Surely, I went into my GoDaddy account and saw that my contact information was in PLAIN VIEW for EVERYONE to see! I couldn't delete it, so I decided to change it into some random info. The only thing I couldn't change was my email address, but in the future, I will definitely get my domains from WA!
BEWARE!
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Great pointers for all of us, thank you :)