Liberty Names of America
These guys do for domain name registrations what the phone companies used to be so fond of doing... they try to trick you into switching to them. They do this by sending you a letter by mail that looks very official. The Liberty Names of America letter reads like an expiration notice that a domain registrar might send, but in this case if you look at the fine print you'll see that it's an attempt to get you to transfer your domain to them.
The reason this works, is because a lot of people don't know or remember who their domains are registered with. Make sure you know this, or can at least find out easily by looking it up when you need to.
Things like this are also easy to spot just by doing a quick web search with the company name as a keyword. Whether it's a hoax, scam or just poor service, you'll often find others who have made their own experience public.
Fighting back
If you're the type that likes to do something about this kind of junk, do feel free to file a complaint with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) or the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (or better yet, all three!)
Two more creative things you can do to fight back are to not open mail from a known company like the above, mark "return to sender" on it, and send it back which increases their cost of sending junk mail to you. If the company is so kind as to send return envelopes with postage-paid, it can be fun to take one company's junk mail, and send it to another in their postage-paid envelope. All it costs you is a few minutes of time, and you can sleep well that night for having helped to make it less profitable for scammers.
UPDATE: Has your website disappeared?
In September of 2010 we started hearing from people who had hosted their website with Liberty Names of America, that their website had gone missing. On 9/9/2010 we were unable to view the LNOA website, which may indicate anything from technical problems to their having gone out of business. (Maybe that's just wishful thinking!) In any case, if you are in need of web hosting services (or domain name registration) please let us know.
