Business Internet Registry - another scam?

A client of mine has been panicked by a recent call from the Business Internet Directory. It looks suspiciously like they are running a sophisticated scam - contacting online businesses and advising them they have been 'alerted' to the fact that a 3rd party is 'attempting to buy variations of your domain'.

They were told 'all traffic would therefore be diverted to the new domains - however they would not sell the domains if we would buy them within the next 10 mins. Our client was then passed to their 'legal department. who (expressing 'genuine concern') said that the domains should be bought for a 10 year period. There is a handling charge for the service of £800 plus £50 per domain (they quoted 5 variants of www.born2becool.com - such as born2bcool/born2becoolkids etc.

Has anyone else encountered anything similar? Having checked the domain availability and other postings on SME and FSB boards it seems to be a new scam tactic from Business Internet Directory

It's not particularly new either. Had to be 5 or more years ago that I had a flurry of similar calls about "The Sales Direction Database" and simply suggested to them that anyone setting up a web site with that name would be certifiably insane - given that I owned the database! Turns out that it might well have been a "sales direction" variable, and they use the similarity angle to indeed try to panic people into registering a whole heap of protective domains.

I also got a bit suspicious when researching possible names for ModernSelling.com and felt that some good alternatives were getting snapped up in the day or so after I searched them and found them to be available. But, in the longer term, given all the variables you can include in a url, and the desirability of actually making those good keywords anyway (like who's going to search for "born2becool" - as opposed to "how-to-be-cool") it seems most sensible to just ignore them, as Ashley says.