CHINESE .CN DOMAIN NAME SCAMS
Have you or anyone in your company recently received an email warning you that a company wants to register a .cn domain name which may contain your company name or trademark?
Scam email example
Over the past few months a number of our clients have contacted us after receiving this type of unsolicited email.
We are Century Net Group Stocks Limited, which is an organization authorised by Chinese government and an official agent of CNNIC professionally responsible for oversea domain name registration and dispute service.
Yesterday, our company received an application from a Chinese company saying that they want to register "YOUR COMPANY NAME" as their Internet Brand and CN domain name but after our confirmation, we found this name will conflict with your company's name. According to the regulation and procedure of CNNIC, it's our duty to send this email to note you about it. Because you are the owner of this trademark, you have the preferential right to register and protect by yourself!
Of course, if you have no any disagreement on this matter or you give it up, any individuals or organization have the right to register, which is legal. So we will register for any applicant. If you oppose other company to register your trademark and want to protect your intellectual property right, please contact me at early time.
These emails can take many different forms but the basics are always the same:
- They claim to have received an application by another company who want a .cn domain name that features your company name or trademark.
- They claim to be authorised by the CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) which is the Chinese equivalent of Nominet who control the registrations of .uk domain names in the United Kingdom.
- Their use of English can falter in certain areas.
- They say they want to help you to stop the other company from registering the .cn domain name in question.
- The emails are likely to have full contact details, including phone, email and fax, making them seem more legitimate.
- Prices are never mentioned (and can be 10 to 40 times more than the going rate)
Examples of the domain names that these emails appear to come from are:
- worldregistry.com.cn
- shanghainic.org.cn
- mips-china.org.cn
- dntcl.hk.cn
- gomerit.com.cn
- kingsan.org.cn
- registryid.com
- asiaeu.cn
- xing-guo.org.cn
This is by no means an exhaustive list, many of these emails are sent from addresses at major free email providers such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, etc.
What should I do?
The basic rule here is do not reply, even if you receive two or three emails from what appears to be different companies. The emails are part of a scam which has been around on the Internet for many years targeting various different domain extensions (.com, .net, etc).
Now that the Chinese Internet population has overtaken the United States, China has a reported 253 million users compared with 223 million in the US (source : BBC), the .cn domain has proved to be a prime target for spammers, scammers and phishers.
Still want to register the .cn domain name?
In almost 99% of cases the .cn domain name in question is freely available to register. If you think you may expand into the emerging Chinese market and a .cn domain name might be of use, you can register it for as little as £15 per year, with several of the large domain name registrars now offering .cn domain name registrations.
