We have received a great deal of feedback on this post. I am thankful that this information has helped a lot of people and protected people from being taken advantage of by these scammers.
Christopher Laursen with European Domain Centre sent me this link and asked me to share it. It has additional information about this particular scam, including a list of senders.
Please feel free to continue to leave comments with your updates on this post. We have the comments set to be approved before they show up because of the high volume of spam this particular post receives (most of it originating from the People's Republic of China...coincidence?)
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:[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 7:50 AM
To: info@[domainname]
Subject: Internet domain name & keywordDear 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