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Beware of Chinese Domain Scams

December 9, 2010 by Tim Bradshaw, Founder & CEO

Don't Let Yourself Be Victimized!

We've all heard of Internet scams to steal your identity, your credit card number, bank account information, etc. There appears to be a scam that has been occuring at least for the past several months that was brought to my attention today when a local business forwarded us the e-mail I have pasted below.

The concerned business owner did not know whether or not this e-mail was legitimate, which if you are not living and breathing the Internet industry everyday like we do here at Insercorp it can oftentimes be difficult to distinguish what's real and what's not, especially as scam artists get better and better.

The manager of the local business who contacted us did the right thing by asking.

The e-mail copied below is basically telling the business owner or manager that their "international identity" is in jeopardy because "Company X" has "attempted" to register their domain name with .cn, com.cn, .asia, etc. extensions. In reality they are just trying to resell domain names with Chinese/Asia extensions.

Unless you intend to do business in Asia or China, there is no reason to have a domain name outside of your US domain name (.com, .net, .org, .co., .us, .gov, etc).

The business' name was replaced with [domainname] to protect their confidentiality.

From: John [mailto:john.xu@ygnetwork.org.cn]
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 7:50 AM
To: info@[domainname]
Subject: Internet domain name & keyword

Dear Manager:

This email is from China domain name registration center, which mainly deal with the domain name registration and dispute internationally in China and Asia.
On December.8th,2010, We received HAITONG company's application that they are registering the name " [domainname] " as their Internet Keyword and " [domainname] .cn "" [domainname] .com.cn " " [domainname] .asia "domain names etc..,It is China and ASIA domain names.But after auditing we found the brand name been used by your company. As the domain name registrar in China, it is our duty to notice you, so I am sending you this Email to check.According to the principle in China,your company is the owner of the trademark,In our auditing time we can keep the domain names safe for you firstly, but our audit period is limited, if you object the third party application these domain names and need to protect the brand in china and Asia by yourself, please let the responsible officer contact us as soon as possible. Thank you!

Best regards,

John
Oversea marketing manager
Tel:+86(0)21 6191 8696
Fax:+86(0)21 6191 8697
web:www.ygnetwork.com.cn

User Comments

sirinda on February 1, 2012

I received it too, and we were considering whether to purchase them, as were worried about ranking positions within search engines, if another organisation registered it. Although we couldn't work out why an org in China would want to register a name with Sheffield in it!

Tim on December 20, 2011

Hi Bridget, You can actually register .asia, .com.cn, .net.cn, or .org.cn at ICANN accredited registrars (such as GoDaddy.com). I suggest if you DO wish to secure your domain name in Asia or China you should verify that the registrar you are using is ICANN accredited. ICANN maintains a list of accredited registrars here: http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/accredited-list.html

Bridget Jupp on December 1, 2011

Greetings. Refer to your information concerning Chinese Domain scams. We received the information set out below regarding our company called kmEGD. Perhaps you can comment on this. Bridget Jupp Subject: Notice of Intellectual Property-Trademark Name From: "Angela" Date: Mon, November 14, 2011 8:37 am To: keymarketing@kmegd.com Priority: Normal Options: View Full Header | View Printable Version | Download this as a file | View Message details | View as plain text Dear Manager, We are a Network Service Company which is the domain name registration center in Anhui, China. On November,14th,2011, We received DATON Company's application that they are registering the name "kmegd" as their Internet Trademark and "kmegd.cn","kmegd.com.cn" ,"kmegd.asia"domain names etc.,It is China and ASIA domain names.But after auditing we found the brand name been used by your company. As the domain name registrar in China, it is our duty to notice you, so I am sending you this Email to check.According to the principle in China,your company is the owner of the trademark,In our auditing time we can keep the domain names safe for you firstly, but our audit period is limited, if you object the third party application these domain names and need to protect the brand in china and Asia by yourself, please let the responsible officer contact us as soon as possible. Thank you! Kind Regards Angela Zhang Anhui Office (Head Office) Registration Department Manager Room 1008 Shenhui Building Haitian Road, Huli Anhui, China Office: +86 0553 4994789 Fax: +86 0553 4994789 web: www.ygcompany.org

Tim on July 11, 2011

Yes you should ignore this kind of e-mail. You can also use the "Report Spam" feature if your e-mail provider offers it or you can forward it to your E-mail Administrator or IT team.

Karen on June 26, 2011

So basically we should just ignore an e-mail like this if we receive it?

Webmaster on April 19, 2011

I received this exact E-mail, just recently, with our domainname in place of the one you have in read above.

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