Internet Corporation Listing Service

The Internet Corporation Listing Service is a fraudulent corporation that solicits website owners using the US Postal Service. They present the website owner with what looks like a bill or invoice [ [http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,125366-page,2/article.html PC World - Consumer Alert: Ads That Look Like Bills ] ] and attempt to get them to pay between $35 to $95 dollars for submitting their website to 14 major search engines. This information is delivered by the ICLS via email though it is freely available online.

Website owners are found by an automatic searching of the WHOIS database and are sent automatically generated letters. While the solicitation does say that it is a solicitation and not a bill, it instructs the reader to "please remit payment on or before DATE". Due to this and other various characteristics, the offer presents the appearance of an invoice for services already rendered, and is thus readily misinterpreted as a bill and has fooled hundreds of website owners into paying because they thought that their website would be shut down if they did not.

This company's mail solicitations are along the lines of a well-known mail fraud scheme described as "Solicitations in the guise of an invoice":

"This is not an invoice. This is a solicitation. You are under no obligation to make any payments on account of this offer unless you accept this offer."
--- PLEASE PAY THIS AMOUNT --->
So begins the wording on some rather slippery documents which look like they're bills or invoices even though they're not. The wording of the disclaimer is taken directly from the US Postal Service Domestic Mail Manual; the intent is to be able to claim that this document is not a fake invoice while still retaining a format which allows a small percentage of recipients to mistake it for a bill and send payment. If the amounts requested from businesses by these "solicitations" are in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, even a fraction of a percent response rate suffices for the scheme to be profitable.

Schemes involving actual fake bills or invoices (such as one where copies of a bogus dry-cleaning bill are mailed to every restaurateur in town with a "your server spilled food on my expensive suit, pay my cleaner's bill" note) have also been used to attempt to take unsuspecting victims to the cleaners.

The company's website, [http://www.icls.net www.icls.net] , is listed to Michelle Doyle in San Jose, California (registration record reads "ICLS, 2530 Berryessa Rd. #912, San Jose, CA 95132" - a postal drop box) but has post office boxes in Chicago, New York and has various payments sent to offices in the Netherlands and Zaire. This practice is currently under investigation by the US Postal Inspection Service.To further add to this as of 1/09/08 - their home address is now listed as in the Bahamas.

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