Apparently domain thieves and scammers are on the loose only a few days into the new year with a phishing scam for the ages.

Yesterday, I wrote about GoDaddy and their nonchalant attempt to get me to verify my email address and whois information for the numerous domains I own so that I’m in compliance with the ICANN verification process.

My point of yesterday’s email was pointing out that domains registered with GoDaddy were not auto-renewing from some strange reason.

In short, I had to manually renew the domains that did not auto renew and will probably have to keep a close eye on my account over the next few days, weeks and months until all is remedied.

On further inspection of my GoDaddy account, I also noticed some domains with “Pending Whois Verification” as their status.

This was strange because I had never seen this before listed as the status for any of my domains.

Long story short, as a part of ICANN’s new verification process, domain owners must now verify their information by a certain time period.

If you don’t verify the information by the deadline date, then you could not only lose your domain name, but also risk losing all services associated with the domain name.

This may come as a shock to alot of people who don’t log into their domain accounts on a regular basis.

No telling what they may find if they only login a few times a year when they do login.

But where this story takes a twist is when I receive an email from GoDaddy stating something about verifying my email address.

And then I wake up this morning to the see headlines stating “…GoDaddy Phishing Email Scam…”

Not a good way to start my morning off to say the least.