Domain Registration Scams?

Question

I frequently get emails like the one below. I assume they're a scam, but I don't know how the scam works.

Dear manager,

We are a professional Internet consultant organization in Asia, which mainly deal with the global companies’ domain name registration and internet intellectual property right protection. Currently, we have a pretty important issue needing to confirm with your company.

On 2009-07-20, we received an application formally, one person named “REDACTED” wanted to applied for the Internet brand REDACTED and some domain names through our body.

During our preliminary investigation,we found that these domain names’ keyword and internet brand is identical with your trademark. I wonder whether you consigned "REDACTED" to register these domain names through us or not?

<< snip >>

In addition, I must state that we have time limited for one person or one company’s registration. It is just 15 days. If your company files doesn't resent within the time limited. We will unconditionally authorized the application of "REDACTED".

What's the best way of dealing with these? Currently I just ignore them...

Answer 1

The aim of these emails is to try and scare you into buying domains, or re-buying if you allready own them, by prenteding that they have an interested party that is going to by them and infringe on your trademark.

People who then attempt to buy these domains through this company will find that the prices are massively inflated and they would probably not even get the domains the pay for anyway.

I usually just ignore these emails. You could attempt to forward them to an authority to deal with them, the problem is finding which once. If they are infact a domain registrar you could lodge a complaint with ICAAN, or the higher level registrar they are buying from. If they are not then you would need to look to the police or other authority wherever they are based, but that's hard to find and often they will not care.

Answer 2

I think you're adopting the best approach.

I would think that they'd offer to return the registration to you or extract compensation for an up-front fee and then you'd never hear from them again.

Answer 3

I've seen these before when I was on the ISP side of the domain name business. More often than not they actually included the allegedly requested domain names.

In those cases if I decided I actually did want the domains, I'd register them through my normal reseller and then thank the scammers for bringing them to my attention :)

If they don't include the domain names, just ignore them.

Answer 4

I recently recieved a similar one, except that they listed a very long list of domains that they wanted to register. It actually helped me, since I've forgotten to register the .com for our company.

Just ignore them (or use them as a helpful reminder like I do).