Urgent! Possible domain name dispute

the big boys from the East are after me?

[workingNOMAD]

I own the .com and have done for 5 years, it is a generic two word name.

Anyway I have just received this email from China (have removed the obvious things!)

What do you guys think, I have 5 days to respond? Should I allow them to register the domains below in the hope of selling the .com eventually?

Here is the email anyway...

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

Subj: Announcement - about "mydomainname" dispute

(If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please forward to your CEO, as this is urgent, thank you.)

Dear CEO,

We are the department of registration service in China. We have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on August 31, 2010, one company which called "Some Big Taiwan Electronics Company" is applying to register "mydomainname" as brand name and domain names as below :

mydomainname.asia
mydomainname.cn
mydomainname.com.cn
mydomainname.com.hk
mydomainname.com.tw
mydomainname.hk
mydomainname.in
mydomainname.tw


After our initial checking, we found the brand name and these domain names being applied are as same as your company's, so we need to get the confirmation from your company. If the aforesaid company is your business partner or your subsidiary company, please don't reply us, we will approve the application automatically. If you have any relationship with this company, please contact us within 5 workdays. If out of the deadline, we will approve the application submitted by "Some Big Taiwan Electronics Company" unconditionally.



Best Regards,

[LifeinAsia]

Most likely a scam. If you reply and say they are not authorized to register those names, they will most likely "offer" to register them to you so you can block others from registering them and thus protect your name.

[workingNOMAD]

Checked the email header and comes from someone [at] drc-asia.com who are representing the Taiwan company, both seem legit.

[LifeinAsia]

Well, maybe not scam in the sense of taking your money and giving you nothing in return, but scam in the sense of looking up registered .com names and notifying the owners about impending registrations (that end up being bogus) so that the .com owners will pay for the registrations themselves.

Think about it this way- have you ever heard of Network Solutions (or any other major U.S. registrar) notifying existing trademark holders before registering a potentially infringing domain name? Didn't think so- they're more than happy to take the registration money and let the trademark holder and new domain owner go fight things out later.

[workingNOMAD]

Oh, I think you are right!

And there was I already dreaming of selling the .com for several millions dollars and retiring young.

Oh well, back to work.

[LifeinAsia]

Here is a similar thread:
Notice of Intellectual Property-Trademark Name [webmasterworld.com]

[1script]

It's not really a scam but rather a dubious sales technique. Do you care if someone owns an example.com.cn if you own example.com? If you owned, say, paypal.com, then I guess you'd be concerned that someone may craft a legit-looking email from PayPal and people would get scammed 'cause they didn't check that it's .com.cn, not .com.

Me? I could care less if someone has a name close to mine but in .cn TLD. Be my guest! I'm most likely going to benefit from their promotions because most people would ignore .cn and type .com by mistake anyways.

I own approx. 200 .com domain names and receive 3-4 emails like this per week, all get ignored. I cannot imagine how many of those big boys having several thousand domains names are receiving, they must have a special spam rule just for these silly emails!

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

It is a scam. I get these every other day for different domain names. They are telling you lies to get you to purchase domain names at inflated prices. That is a scam. Tell them to **** off or ignore them.

Actualy I sometimes have a bit of fun with them. I take their text, use google translate to translate it into some other unknown language and reply to them with this with my business signature. It really confuses them and wastes their time. ;o)

[HuskyPup]

I get these every day as well, in fact they're so stupid at times they do not even check to see if those names have even been registered...I have even been offered mydomain.ccTLDs when I have owned them for years!

[workingNOMAD]

Like you have said why own the .asia .hk etc when you have the daddy!

[drongo]

Scam, ignore.