Imagine if someone gave you a free bookshelf. You took it home and loaded it up with books. Then they came back and said that unless you gave them $1000, the bookshelf and all the books on it were theirs now. Would you not consider that a scam either?
I don't believe any physical metaphor counts here. No goods exchange hands here. In fact, in many cases, customers aren't even the technical owners of the domain, merely the licensees.
DNS, especially dealing in domain names, is a service. In this case, I'd say they provide you with free newsletters if you sign up. If you send out enough newsletters to others, they stop giving you free stuff and you have to pay.
I've found this in the terms and conditions:
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11.2. Renewal
As long as you have remained in compliance with each of the terms of this Agreement from the date you agreed to be bound by this Agreement, including without limitation the minimum use requirements set forth in Section 10.1, we may elect in our sole discretion to (i) allow you to upgrade to the Paid Service at the prevailing applicable rate, (ii) automatically renew this Agreement for a term, determined by Freenom, from such date (the "Renewal Period") and (iii) continue providing you with FREE DOMAIN subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement (including a renewal of the registration of the domain name provided to you in connection with FREE DOMAIN).
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This seems pretty clear to me. At the end of a term (which can be a month or a year) they can decide to require upgrading to a paid subscription. If you choose not to renew for the paid plan, your domain will be resold like any domain reseller will do.
The main problem I see here is the lack of a renewal notice. I've always received renewal warnings myself, but always with high spam scores (because free TLDs are often used for sending spam). This could be a problem with the customer's spam filter filtering out the right renewal notices.
This doesn't look as much like a scam as it looks like looking a gift horse in the mouth in my opinion.
A bookshelf is a problematic comparison since we do have devices that people buy that has a built in bookshelf, one that can remove books at the company discretion. The digital books you loaded it up with at home is not owned by you, nor do you have any natural right to the book or the bookshelf.
However, they won't lock it up and demand payment. They simply just lock it up at the discretion of the company.
The digital bookshelf will record and analyze what you read which is a bit of switch-and-bait tactic.
It’s more akin to any other domain registrar that offers a discount for the 1st year of registration. Or a hosting company that gives you a “free” 1 year domain registration with paid hosting.
That’s not a scam or fraud when the renewal period rolls around and the annual fee increases from the discount rate or you have to pay for the 1st time.
The scam/fraud seems to be the review alleging the reviewer had a high traffic domain name that was just taken without notice so Freenom could sell it.
