what is this?

[tashabear]

I just got this email to my business account:

Dear Manager: This is China Domain Name registrar, We have imporant thing confirm with you. We formally received an application on 3rd,Nov,2008, One person who named Mr. Chen ( www.icuxiao.com.cn) is applying to register " essexleather" as Internet Trademark and the .ASIA/.CN(like abc.asia/.cn/.com.cn/.net.cn/.org.cn) domain names in China to promote their company and do the promotion on the Google, Baidu and some famous search engine.

After our initial examination, we found that the Internet trademark and domain names applied for registration are the same with your company's name and trademark. Two points need you to confirm: 1,whether this alleged Mr. Chen is your business partner or distributor in ASIA? 2, Whether your company need to remain the priority to register these CN names yourself? If he is your company's partner , we will finish his application. If he is not, hope you can tell us your company's decision on this matter. Looking forward to your reply. Best regards! Sunny Zhou,

--------------------------------------------------------------

China Domain Name Registrar:

ShiShun Ltd

Room 908,

Hua Heng International Building,

No.99 TaoWu road,NanTong City

Tel:+(86)0513-8011 8536

Fax:+(86)0513-8011 8539

Web:www.idregistry.com.cn

Any idea what this is? Is it a scam?

Edited November 5, 2008 by tashabear

[CitizenKate]

I've seen this before. This is most likely a domain registrar in China, or elsewhere in Asia, who is trying to con you into registering domain names with them.

They imply that someone in China is after your trademark (i.e., "essexleather"), and has applied for domain names like "essexleather.cn" (which contains the top-level domain name for China). They further imply they are trying to protect your claim to that name by "alerting" you, and giving you the opportunity to take the domain name before granting the registration to "the applicant".

It kind of follows the notion of registering domain names with multiple top-level domain names (such as ".com", ".net", ".biz", etc.) to prevent others from registering domain names very similar to yours in an effort to steal some of your site traffic. But unless you are planning to market your wares in china, on a web site hosted there, I would ignore the claim. If you already have a domain name, such as "essexleather.com", they can't apply for that. But what they probably do is go through all the registered domain names, find out who they're registered to, and send them emails like this to get more domain registration business.

Hope this is clear enough...

Kate

[celticleather]

Certainly sounds a bit scammy to me! I would take CitizenKate's advice and ignore it.

[TwinOaks]

So....basically it's 'legalized extortion' to get money from you (and probably access to your account info) to keep someone from opening a site with the same name except for the suffix?

[Johanna]

Gotta love domain name speculators/extortionists...someone bought "leatherworkerS.net" and wants A LOT of $$$$ for it. Not gonna get it from us!

Johanna

[tashabear]

So....basically it's 'legalized extortion' to get money from you (and probably access to your account info) to keep someone from opening a site with the same name except for the suffix?

Seems like it... and it's exactly what I expected. I've already deleted the email.

[OutBackP]

I had one of those this morning exactly the same. Did a quick google about them and read your letter on your blog.

Thanks for posting this as I was going to ask the same question.

[TwinOaks]

Tasha, do yourself a quick and painless favor- run your antivirus and spyware programs. Not that I have any reason per se, but you never know with foreign based ISPs. Legitimate sounding emails are the quickest way to sneek in a trojan.

Mike

[Beaverslayer]

I got the same e-mail stating that they had a client that was looking to register "beaverslayer" with a whole bunch of extensions. I responded to them and explained that if they wanted to it was their prerogative, I had no intentions of purchasing the domains they were looking a registering.

They responded in kind, saying that their client would not register the names if I decided to register them first....(of course they wouldn't )

Over the next 2 weeks or so, they continued to send me emails wanting to know when I was going to register the names. I answered every one of them, explaining that here in Canada, there is a lengthy process before a Canadian can register any domain names. They have now stopped sending the e-mails, and if they ever do show up again, I think I'll play with them some more, maybe have them contact some fictitious lawyers office to have the pertinent documentation FedEx'd or something like that.

Sometimes you can have a whole lot of fun with these scammers from overseas, the Nigerians haven't bothered me in quite some time now..LOL

Ken