One of our clients recently received an email from a supposed domain register in China. The message looks similar to below:
Please kindly forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent. If you believe this has been sent to you in error, please ignore it. Thanks)
Dear CEO,
We are a Network Service Company which is the domain name registration center in Shanghai, China. We received an application from Hongshun Ltd on May 17, 2024. They want to register "BUSINESSNAME" as their internet keyword and China (CN) domain names (BUSINESSNAME.cn, BUSINESSNAME.com.cn, BUSINESSNAME.net.cn, BUSINESSNAME.org.cn). 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 your distributor or business partner in China?
Best Regards
Albert Liu | Service & Operations Manager
China Registry (Head Office)
Tel: +86-2161918696
Fax: +86-2161918697
Mob: +86-13816428671
1275, Kaike Building, No. 1801 Hongmei Road, Shanghai 200233, China
*****************************************
This email contains privileged and confidential information intended for the addressee only. If you are not the intended recipient, please destroy this email and inform the sender immediately. We appreciate you respecting the confidentiality of this information by not disclosing or using the information in this email.This appears to be a domain scam where the send is trying to scare the business into purchasing their domain in China to protect their business name. In researching this scam, we found mention of other businesses that responded and were charged exorbitant fees, some that were thousands of dollars per year more than the normal domain registration.
You can do whatever you would like to with this email, but personally, we would delete and ignore! If you are concerned about your intellectual property in China (or any other country for that matter), you should be able find registrar for whatever country you are interested in and register them yourself.
Some of the following articles were used to come to our conclusions:
- https://www.dqindia.com/beware-china-domain-name-registration-scam-ignore-mails-cn-mentioning-domain-conflict
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/beware-rising-domain-name-scams-from-china-cautionary-girish-mehta-jvofc/
- https://community.cloudflare.com/t/a-chinese-company-is-trying-to-register-my-website-domain-name-for-their-client/583416
- https://harris-sliwoski.com/chinalawblog/china-domain-name-scams/