Suckered?

I became suspicious. Sometime recently I received some e-mails claiming to be from various colleges. They were mostly just text (but not in text-only format, apparently), and all of them offered to mail me something if I went to some website and filled in some contact information. I followed through on one or two e-mails, only later realizing that the e-mails didn't originate from genericuniversity.edu, but from genericuniversity-info.org or genericuniversity-admit.org or something like that. I usually pride myself on being able to spot suspicious things before I act on an e-mail, but somehow these slipped by me.

The genericuniversity-something.org pattern of domains somewhat unsettled me; it would make much more sense if the originating domains were all in the form of something.genericuniversity.edu. Growing more suspicious, I pulled up the root pages of these domains in a web browser, and all show the same generic layout... see these examples.

I fidgeted about in a mildly disturbed state for a few minutes before I remembered to do a whois. I only bothered to check two domains, but that was enough—both pointed me to "Royall and Company". Googling for the name brought up not just their website but also news pages at a few .edu domains announcing some deal with this "Royall and Company" organization.

Oh, yay, not suckered... but I still think Royall and Company smells funny. The College Board too.