Did Parava Bilk Clients from Renewal Fees?

Parava alleged to have kept renewal fees instead of paying them to VeriSign.

What’s a warning sign that your domain name registrar is regarding to leave you in a lurch? You pay it to renew your domain many years in advance, but it only renews it for one year at a time. Apparently a lot of Parava clients have experienced that.

This stretch Tucows (Hover.com) took over the domain names that were at Parava, which was de-accredited by ICANN. It didn’t take long for people to notice that their domains had different expiration dates than they expected. On Hover.com’s web site, the firm wrote:

We have received notes that Parava was accepting money for renewals and not forwarding those fees to the registry or renewing the domain. It is alleged that they would then update their whois to make it appear that the domain name had been in fact renewed.

When your domain name was transferred to Tucows and your account was created with Hover, we synchronized your expiration date in Hover with the data on file with the registry. It is possible that your name may be set to expire ahead of you think it will since of an unpaid renewal. To prevent this, please sign in to your Hover account and provide us with updated billing information so that we can renew your name automatically for you prior to its expiration.

It turns out that over a year ago Jamie Zoch of DotWeekly noted this problem on a post at DNForum.

If you charged multiple years of registration on a credit card, you may be able to get that reversed by the credit card firm. If you want to complain to Parava, good luck getting in touch with them. But here’s a bit of information to get you started:

Franchise Tax certificate at Texas Comptroller stating Parava owner name and address

And here’s the address on ICANN’s termination letter to Parava:

Mr. Patricio Valdes
Parava Networks, Inc. dba 10-Domains.com
1800 Bering Dr., Suite 420
Houston, TX 77057
United States

If you Google either of these addresses you might be able to track down Mr. Valdes — or someone who knows him.