A couple of years ago, Jeff Ventura blogged about a fairly cunning domain name scam originating from China, whereby owners of domain names would be contacted by a 'registrar' indicating that another company was trying to register domain names with Asian TLDs that matched their existing domain name. This died down for a while, but it's back again (and it doesn't seem to have changed at all). I received one of these emails myself last week for a company I work for; read more for all the gory details (including copypasta of the email conversation I had with "Lebron Zhu"). Sinohosting also reported on this when it first began to occur.
[Update, July 20: They're still at it, this time with a new name and company: James Hong, "Senior Consultant of domain name registration and solution center in china" and "one company which self-styled "Packs Co.,ltd" were applying to register [company name] as Network Brand
and following domain names".If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck... [update ends]
From Jeff's blog entry;
This is clever and it took a bit of time to figure out the pathology. But there is one, and it's interesting. Continue reading "Chinese domain name prospecting scam - it's back"