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We recently received the following email.
Dear CEO,
(If you are not in charge of this, please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent. Thanks)
We are a Network Service Company which is the domain name registration center in Shanghai, China. On Feb 20, 2012, we received an application from Hantong company requested “shieldadvanced” 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 your distributor or business partner in China?
Kind regards
Edward Wang
Office Manager
Shanghai Office (Head Office)
3002, Nanhai Building, No. 854 Nandan Road,
Xuhui District, Shanghai 200070, China
Tel: +86-21-6191-8696
Mobile: +86-182-2195-1605
Fax: +86-21-6191-8697
So we thought this was a sincere attempt to stop a company from registering our domain with a Chinese (CN) registration. We responded with the following note suggesting that we had no affiliation with the company and that we felt they should not register the .CN domain for the company.
Edward
We do not have any partners in China so this is not a valid request from the Hantong company. We thank you for your attention in this matter and hope you can resolve the questions with that company.
Chris..
The today we received the following message.
Dear Chris,
Based on your company having no relationship with them, we have suggested they should choose another name to avoid this conflict but they insist on this name as CN domain names (.cn/.com.cn/.net.cn/.org.cn) and internet keyword on the internet. In our opinion, maybe they do the similar business as your company and register it to promote his company.
According to the domain name registration principle: Domain name and internet keyword which applied based on the international principle are opened to companies as well as individuals. Any companies or individuals have rights to register any domain name and internet keyword which are unregistered. Because your company haven’t registered this name as CN domains and internet keyword on the internet, anyone can obtain them by registration. However, in order to avoid this conflict, the trademark or original name owner has priority to make this registration in our audit period.
If your company is the original owner of this name and want to register these CN domain names (.cn/.com.cn/.net.cn/.org.cn) and internet keyword to prevent anybody from using them, please inform us. We can send you an application form with price list and help your company register them.Kind regards
Edward Wang
Office Manager
Shanghai Office (Head Office)
3002, Nanhai Building, No. 854 Nandan Road,
Xuhui District, Shanghai 200070, China
Tel: +86-21-6191-8696
Mobile: +86-182-2195-1605
Fax: +86-21-6191-8697
It appears to be a scam where the Registrar is scouring the .com domains and sending this note out to hundreds if not thousand of them! I found the following link to a post about a similar request from the same person.
Just as a further push I did receive a note from a Lee Gareth email gareth@live.cn with the following content.
Dear Sirs,
We are Hantong company based in China. We will register the “shieldadvanced” as internet keyword and CN domain names .cn, .com.cn, .net.cn, .org.cn. We have handed in our application and are waiting for Mr. Edward Wang’s approval. We think this name is important for our products in Chinese market. Even though Mr. Edward Wang advises us to change another name, we will persist in this name.
Best regards
Gareth Lee
So if you are sent a note about a company trying to register your domain in China with a follow-up offer to sell it to you to protect your rights its probably going to be a scam. Not sure if anything can be done about this or even if it is legal to carry out this kind of fraudulent activity. We are going to ignore the request, if they do sell our domain to another company we can deal with that when it happens.
Chris…