A few years ago, I got a postcard that said "renew your alarm licence on-line" and the domain wasn't the .ca.gov domain the city uses, but something like "alarm-renewal-online.info"

I had to spend 30 minutes on the phone with my city to verify that this was a legitimate way to renew the alarm. They had contracted with an outside company to do the payment servicing. In the end, I just decided to mail them a check.