Domain Spam from China

A number of out clients have been reporting e-mail similar to the following:

From: Derek Liu
Subject: Confirmation of Domain Registration
Importance: High

(This is very urgent, Please forward this to your CEO.)

Dear CEO,

We are the department of Asian Domain registration service in china, have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on June 1, 2010. one company which self-styled "Kanns Co." were applying to register"euromedalex" as Network Brand and following domain names:

consultanddesign.asia
consultanddesign.cn
consultanddesign.com.cn
consultanddesign.com.hk
consultanddesign.com.tw
consultanddesign.hk
consultanddesign.in
consultanddesign.net.cn
consultanddesign.org.cn
consultanddesign.tw

After our initial checking, we found the brand name were similar to your company's, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. Out of the time limit we will unconditionally finish the registration for "Kanns Co.".

Best Regards,

Derek Liu

Senior Consultant
Tel : +86-21-69106991
Fax : +86-21-69106670
Postal Code: 201315
Address: Room520, No.1775 CaoAnRoad,Jiading District,Shanghai,China

This e-mail is well documented online and is, like most spam, just enticing you to get in contact with them. They automatically send e-mails to random e-mail addresses on a domain and generate the above message so that you contact them to confirm you own the domain, and then they offer to take care of buying up these domains on your behalf. Its a clever, but unsolicited and false claim. You should simply ignore it like any other spam.

There is of course always the issue that people can buy up derivatives of your domain name if you don't yourself own them (a well known case is that of iTunes.co.uk which was owned by someone other than Apple: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/06/apple_itunescouk_domain_dispute/). The only real solution to this is to buy up all the domain extensions you can, however to try and buy them all would cost you hundreds, possibly thousands of Euro's per year and its simply not worth it unless you are a large corporation with endless budgets. If you have .com/.org/.net (and the local derivatives some cases this is not necessary) this should be enough to protect yourself, and if anyone tries to impersonate you online there are potential legal avenues you can then follow.

To summarise, this e-mail is praying on the fear that your "identity" can be taken away, however you have to question whether or not you really need to invest in protecting your identity in China, and how likely it actually is that someone in China would even bother to take the time to do it. I'd suggest chances are very slim.

If you need more information please don't hesitate to contact us.