So an interesting little email landed in our inbox today. It was sent from someone calling themselves “Domain Notifications | DNRS UK”, it knew our company name, our address, our domain, and it was very politely asking us to cough up £89 to keep some sort of “renewal notification service” active.
Reader, I have never signed up for a renewal notification service in my life.
Spoiler: neither have you.
Let’s get into it.
Who are DNRS UK?
According to the email itself, here’s what they’d like you to believe:
- Company name: DNRS UK
- Website: dnrsuk.com
- Address listed: 60 Cannon Street, D19, London EC4N 6NP
- Consultant named in reply signatures: James Anderson
- Invoice “signed” by: David Lee
- Contact email: info@dnrsuk.com
- The ask: £89.00 to “renew the domain renewal notification service”
Sounds very official, right? Very British. Very “yes we are a real company and not three blokes in a basement cycling through made-up names.”
Here’s the thing though. A “domain renewal notification service” is not a product. It does not exist. Your actual domain registrar already sends you renewal reminders for free, because they would quite like you to renew your domain and keep paying them. Nobody in the history of the internet has ever voluntarily paid £89 a year for the privilege of being reminded about something.
Which brings us nicely to…
Why this is 100% a scam
Let’s run through the red flags, because there are a lot of them.
1. The product being “sold” is imaginary. They are not renewing your domain. They are charging you £89 for a “notification service” that does nothing and that you never asked for. Even if you paid, you would receive exactly zero of value in return.
2. The price is mental. A real .uk domain renewal through a proper registrar is about £8 to £12 a year. They are charging nearly ten times that for literally nothing.
3. The pressure tactic is textbook. The email says if you don’t reply within 5 days, they’ll “assume you would like to continue.” That is not how UK consumer or business contract law works. You cannot be opted into a paid service by silence. That’s not a billing model, that’s a dark pattern with a crown on.
4. They scraped your details from public records. The company name, the address, the domain — all of it is available on WHOIS lookups and Companies House. They’re not hacking anything. They’re just scraping public data and pretending they’re already doing business with you.
5. The name is deliberately confusing. “DNRS” sounds a bit like “DNS”. It sounds a bit like a Nominet thing. It sounds a bit official. It’s not. It’s a made-up acronym designed to make you go “oh yeah I’ve probably heard of them” and reach for your card.
6. Trustpilot already has them pinned. Real actual Trustpilot reviews of dnrsuk.com describe the operation as a scam domain registrar sending out fake invoices that cost vastly more than a real renewal.
The best bit – this is an international franchise
Here’s where it gets proper cheeky.
DNRS UK is not a one-off. It is one rebrand in a whole family of rebrands. The exact same scam, word-for-word, same email template, same “renewal notification service” wording, same 5-day deadline, same Apple Pay and Google Pay payment methods, has been hitting inboxes under different national flavours for years.
Previous and current aliases I’ve been able to find:
- DNRS Australia – hit Aussie domain owners, flagged by multiple hosts including Conetix and Melbourne IT
- DRNS New Zealand / DNRS NZ – flagged by New Zealand hosts including MyHost, with warnings also issued by the .nz Domain Name Commission
- DMS Australia – the same operation rebadged after DNRS Australia got too much heat
- DNRS UK / dnrsuk.com – the shiny new UK flavour, now in your inbox
If you read the DNRS Australia scam alerts side by side with the email I received, they are almost identical. Same subject line structure (“Renewal notifications for: www.yourdomain”). Same “Action required” opener. Same “we’ll assume you wish to continue” cancellation trick. Same payment options. Same fake personas.
It’s not one shady company. It’s a scam playbook being franchised country by country.
And the UK version has arrived.
The classic ancestor: Domain Registry of America
For those of you who’ve been around the block, this whole racket probably rings a bell.
This is basically the 2026 email version of the old Domain Registry of America (and its UK cousin, Domain Registry of Europe) paper scam, which ran for years posting letters to UK business owners that looked exactly like domain renewal invoices but were actually transfer requests to a different registrar at a jacked-up price.
Regulators in multiple countries took action against that one. And here we are, twenty-odd years later, watching the exact same business model get a fresh coat of paint and a new email template.
Some things never go out of fashion. Sadly.
What to do if you’ve received one
Quick and simple:
- Do not pay. Obviously.
- Do not reply to the email. Replying confirms your address is live and gets you more spam.
- Do not click the “View Invoice” link. I didn’t, and neither should you.
- Check your real domain renewal date. Log into wherever your domain is actually registered (your registrar, your web agency, your hosting provider) and verify it directly. If you’re not sure who that is, a WHOIS lookup on your own domain will tell you.
- Report it to Action Fraud at actionfraud.police.uk. It takes five minutes and it genuinely feeds into the intelligence picture City of London Police uses.
- Mark it as spam / phishing in your email client. Helps train the filters for everyone else.
- Warn your team. If an email got to you, it’s almost certainly hit someone else in the business too. Accounts departments are the target here, not directors.
What I did
I replied to “James Anderson” at info@dnrsuk.com asking for an official statement on whether their name was being misused, on the off-chance there was some actual company behind it having their name spoofed. Because I am a nice person. And also because I wanted to see what they’d say.
He replied trying to justify their existence, claiming they were legitimate!
I replied;
He came back to me, again!
Wow. I mean, 8/10 for effort “James” – but you have literally confirmed that you are a scammer. Your “Product” is fictional.
Stay scam wise
If you run a small business in the UK and you own a domain, you will get targeted by something like this eventually. They’re getting better. The emails look more convincing. They know your address, your company name, your director’s name, your domain expiry date. Because it’s all public.
The only real defence is knowing the playbook.
- Your domain registrar’s renewal emails come from your registrar, and nowhere else.
- You have never signed up for a “renewal notification service”, because that isn’t a thing.
- Anyone can scrape your Companies House details. That doesn’t mean they know you.
- If in doubt, do not pay, do not reply, do not click. Go and check directly.
Got one yourself? Drop a screenshot in the comments or forward it over via the Submit Scams form. The more of these that rank for “DNRS UK scam” in Google, the fewer people are going to get stung.
Stay scam wise, peeps.