On March 21, 2002, I received what looked like typical junk mail. On a whim, I opeed it and saw that VeriSign wanted me to renew two of may domain names. As you probably have guessed, VeriSign was not the registrar for either domain name.
How deceptive was the letter? Take a look for yourself.
Note that nowhere does it say that my registration will be transferred
to VeriSign. In order to find that, you have to look at the fine print
on the other side of the form. I included the two envelopes (the one
the letter came in and the one for the return mail) so you could see
how deceptive their advertising is: they don't even want to admit
that they were the sender.
What is possibly most disturbing about this is that VeriSign grabbed these domain names out of the WHOIS database. They did not find them on a web page and then look them up. How do I know this? Neither domain name was ever used. Neither appears anywher in Google or AltaVista.
Of course, it is unlikely that ICANN will do anything about this.