Your friend is not the person who owns the domain. The person who owns the domain is the person who registered your friend (even if your friend’s name is on the WHOIS information for the domain). Say you own domain mydomain.com. I call you and say, “you should purchase mydomain.net right now!” If you don’t give me permission to do so, and I purchase the domain anyway, then I’m stuck with a domain I don’t want. Not your responsibility. If your friend is worried about this scammer stealing traffic or something similar, you could try to yank ownership with a trademark claim of prior usage. I’m not an internet or trademark lawyer, though, so you may want to contact one if this is a concern. If it’s not, then the person who registered the domain will probably just let the domain fall back into public domain after the domain expires.

Protection racket. Chinese net registrar = Paulie in the Sopranos.

Not specifically that situation, no. However, asking for a cost is not an agreement to pay any money.

If you get a bill, don’t pay it. You never agreed to a purchase.

Anybody have any experience of this situation?

Yes. The information about when your domain name expires is publicly available.

Dec 6 2007.

For sure its a scam to get you to buy all these domain names.

I believe I have had a similar scam to this before from a Uk registrar claiming they had a client that was about to purchase a domian specificaly sounding like my business … as it as a UK company and a direct phone call I actualy went for that at the time.

I wouldn’t go for this one… I wouldn’t even reply for fear of encouraging even more spam.

B-

From: Villien [mailto:Villien@netinchina.hk]
Sent: Monday, December 03, 2007 12:50 AM
To: greg
Subject: Domain name of domain-name

Dear CEO,

We are the domain name registration organization in Asia, which mainly deal with international company’s in china. We have something important need to confirm with your company.

On the Dec 3, 2007, we received an application formally. One company named “Xinyu Holdings Limited ” wanted to register following Domain names:
domain-name.biz
domain-name.cn
domain-name.com.cn
domain-name.hk
domain-name.info
domain-name.mobi
domain-name.net
domain-name.net.cn
domain-name.org
domain-name.org.cn
domain-name.tw
Internet brand keyword:
domain-name
through our body.

After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names applied for registration are as same as your company’s name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it. If you do not know this company, we doubt that they have other aims to buy these domain names. Now we have not finished the registration of Xinyu company yet, in order to deal with this issue better, Please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Best Regards,
Villien li
———————————————————————————-

Sponsoring Registrar: China Net Technology Limited
Tel : 00852-30759838
Fax 00852-31771520
Email: Villien@netinchina.hk
Website: http://www.china-net.hk

…And there’s the catch. “We’re looking out for you - trust us when we say that Company X wants to register your domain name. All you have to do is register 20 domains with us to protect your own company from getting redirected to porn and competitor sales. Aren’t we helpful? Money, please.”

A nice combination of scare tactics leading to a mass of domain purchases.

>The email seems pretty much personally written
> (not auto-generated).

Best case, it’s a pasted text with a find-and-replace of “your domain name.com” to represent whoever they’re emailing. Basically, send an email to the administrative contact of a domain. Based on the email’s domain, paste that into the text of your email. I could see doing that manually, but automated mailers could easily do the job exponentially faster.

Also remember what I said originally - you don’t need netinchina to do this work for you. Your network and system administrator can do this through more trusted companies - the “big guns” of domain registration - like netsol.com and register.com.

>Can more people please share their experiences
>with netinchina with us?

Hear hear! Anyone else?

Hi Chris,

Because domain name takes open registration, this is international domain name registration principle. So Starnet company has right to register it. As a domain name registrar, we have no right to dispute their application. So required by China government to inform your company to protect your interest.

I think you must know some cases about the domain names grabbed by the others or the third party, and also frequently happens internationally. They register the domain for imitating you web. And invade some market of you or link to some illegal porno webs or sell to your competitors, even something worse. I understand that all the foresaid are not the situation you want to meet, if you want to better develop you company, what to do is obvious to you. I hope you pay your attention to these, that’s why we inform you, we also won’t want to see things happen like this.

As the owner of “zaratours.com”, you will get the priority to register these domain names and keyword. Of course, each company has their own idea. If you don’t think their application will affect your company, you can give up, we will finish their registration. But if you think their registration will confuse your clients and harm your profits, we can send an application form to you and help you register these within dispute period. This is the only way to prevent domain name grab. Hope get your decision ASAP, so that we can handle the next step.

Sincerely
Anthony
—
The email seems pretty much personally written (not auto-generated). I don’t find a lot about this practise on the internet. Can more people please share their experiences with netinchina with us? More people having received such mails before?