Our service is fully paid in advance; charges (and services) automatically suspend when your account runs out of funds. Under ordinary circumstances, it is not possible to overdraw your account. Here are the least uncommon extraordinary circumstances:
- If your usage is just right when your account is depleted, you can wind up with a negative balance of a penny or two. If that happens and you don't want to add additional funds, don't worry. When you cancel, our system will discard the overdrawn amount.
If you are being charged per day for RespectMyPrivacy service, it can overdraw your account. Usually, RespectMyPrivacy is charged per year, but there are two exceptions:
- If you have had a registered domain with RespectMyPrivacy service since per-day billing was the norm and you have continuously maintained a low account balance.
- If you request RespectMyPrivacy for an inbound transfer of a domain registered for multiple years, and you don't have enough funds to pay for the privacy charges once the transfer completes, it will auto-switch to daily billing.
In either case, the unpaid privacy service can overdraw your account. That is intentional; the consequences of disabling or canceling that service are permanent. Once your information becomes public, reactivating privacy later won't cause people to unsee it or remove it from databases that track whois changes. We would rather lose money than let a brief lapse permanently compromise your privacy.
So, because we do respect your privacy and we know that oversights happen, we won't cancel RespectMyPrivacy service for lack of funds. However, when you hit zero, we will apply the associated charge as a negative balance that you will have to clear before accessing any services. If you leave a balance negative due to unpaid privacy charges for more than 30 days, affected domains may be suspended for having invalid contact information.
The best way to check this is to go to the Account Information panel for the overdrawn account and look at the "Estimated Recurring Activity" box. It will contain a "RespectMyPrivacy Service" line showing how many domains you have with privacy service and how many are prepaid.
- Chargebacks can also result in a significant negative balance. You must resolve any chargebacks and related negative balances before you can cancel your membership or access any services paid for by the charged-back funds. ICANN allows chargebacks as one of the few justifications for a registrar to suspend or seize a domain name. We dispute all chargebacks as a matter of policy and take a dim view of people who file them. (Except in cases of credit card fraud, where we take a very dim view of the person using a stolen credit card with our service instead.)
Vanishingly few members will ever see a negative balance. If you do, we hope you will correct it as soon as possible to ensure the successful operation of our services.