China Domain Registrar Scams

A lot of domain owners are receiving letters like the following (actual domain name replaced with XXXX):

  From: Gino Li [mailto:gino@hkitos.net]
  Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2009 8:15 PM
  To: List - ggs-sales
  Subject: Copyright of XXXX (To principal) Urgent
  Importance: High

  Dear Principal,

  We get your name and email address from the Internet. It is glad to
  write to you with keen hope to open a business relationship with you in
  the future.

  We are professional IT outsourcing service company in Hong Kong, On the
  July 12, 2009, we received an application formally from Dingfu Holding
  Ltd. they want to applicant the suffix domain names ralated the keyword
  "XXXX" and internet keyword:"XXXX" for registration from us.

  After our initial examination, we find out that the alleged
  Dingfu Holding Ltd. has no trade mark, Intellectual property, nor
  patent even similar to that word. we found that the brand name and
  domain names applied for registration are as same as your company's
  name and trademark. If you do not know this company, we doubt that they
  have other aims to buy these domain names. These days we are dealing
  with it. We need to know the comment of your company because the domain
  names and Internet brand name may relate to the copyright of brand name
  on internet. Now we have not finished the registration of them yet, in
  order to deal with this issue better, Please contact us by telephone or
  email as soon as possible.

  Have a nice day !
  Best regards,

  Gino Li
  Hong Kong Net Center
  Tel:      00852-30723948 $By-(BFax:     00852-30723949
  Email:  gino@hkitos.net  $By-(BWeb:   w w w. h k i t o s. c o m

It's a scam

We believe this letter is a scam designed to convince you to register domain names you might not really want. Based on the number of these we've seen, with that exact text, we do not believe they are actually responding to someone trying to register domains with your name.

Of course, someone 'could' register the ".cn" version of your domain (just like they could register the ".net" version even if you already have the ".com" version. Some people will try to protect their trademarks by registering the domain with all available extensions. Doing this, and keeping up the registrations yearly is time consuming and expensive, so most people don't bother. This letter is clearly playing on your fears that someone else might register your name in another country to try and convince you to register it with them.

If you google for parts of the text from that message, like "Dingfu Holding" or "domain names applied for registration" you'll find many posts from others who have received the same message.

2010 Update

As of Summer 2010, we are still seeing reports of this flavor of scam. Many of the scam letters claim to be from "a professional internet consultant organization in Asia".