Domain hijack attempt?

Email in French demands action or I lose domain

[narrowboater]

Please forgive me if others already know about this but I was pretty amazed to get an email today in French, from a French domain registration business telling me that I had requested a transfer of one of my domains (I hadn't) and that I needed to click a link in the email to confirm/deny the transfer.

And - get this - if I didn't reply within five days, the transfer would be made anyway.

Suspecting a scam I copied the email to my registration company (I guess, the biggest) who have just told me that, yes, I've got to do what the email says. I'm kind of stunned that it could be this easy for someone to get their hands on my domain.

What if I'd been on vacation and away from my messages for more than five days? What if my schoolboy French had been rustier than it is? What if the next message I get like this is in a language I can't understand?

Is this something new? It's the first I'd heard about it and definitely the first time it's happened to me.

[tomda]

Read this thread dated 10 October
[webmasterworld.com...]

[narrowboater]

Thanks Tomda. Guess I'd missed that one. Pretty scary though. Anyone any advice on how 'locking' a domain is done please? Cheers.

[tomda]

You need to check this your register.
If you do not know who your register is, use Whois to find out.

This is what I did and because my DNS is not locked (and I can't lock it through the admin panel) I send them an email.

No reply until now...