China (CN) domain registration solicitation

Fact or Fiction

[herb]

Received the following notice. Sounds legitimate but nothing I have ever seen. Thoughts please

(It's very urgent, please transfer this email to your CEO. Thanks)

We are the domain name registration service company in China. On April 21, 2016, we received an application from Kejing Holdings Ltd requested "widget" as their internet keyword and China (CN) domain names. But after checking it, we find this name conflict with your company name or trademark. In order to deal with this matter better, it's necessary to send email to you and confirm whether this company is associated with your company or not?

Kind regards
Robert Liu
General Manager
YIGUDNS (Headquarters)
3005, Jinxuan Building, No. 238 Nandan Road,
Shanghai 200030, China

[buckworks]

I've had a few letters similar to this over the years, and I'm pretty sure it's just a registrar trying to drum up business.

If your business would benefit from registering and having control of the .cn version of your domain, by all means do so. But do it through your normal registrar, not this one.

[lucy24]

We are the domain name registration service company in China.

Is that a linguistic error (afaik, no form of Chinese uses articles) or a reflection of fact?

"THE registration service company" = you have to go through them to get a .cn (in the way that, for example, all .edu is handled by a single registrar)
"A registration service company" = nothing in particular

[bill]

This is an old scam that caught on in China before the Beijing Olympics when the government thought it would be great publicity to offer .cn names at ridiculously low prices. If I recall it was under 10¢ for a year if you registered from China. This immediately resulted in scammers and spammers registering tons of .cn domains. China eventually caught on to the folly of this idea and changed their policy. However, that's when this scam started.

In about 2007 I started receiving these mails. [webmasterworld.com...] It must have been a successful campaign, because it's still going strong today. This particular practice even has it's own section under domain name scams in Wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org].

If you're interested in protecting your brand in China. Buy the names yourself from a reputable registrar. Don't give these scammers your business. I get so many of these 'notices' that I have an e-mail filter to put them in their appropriate place.

[RedBar]

Everything bill says above is correct and China actually had to have a massive clear-up of the mess of their own making in the end.

I actually own a few Chinese names and it amazes me that I get such emails about names I already own! Occasionally I get similar emails about .asia