I received the following email last week:
(Letter to the President or Brand Owner, thanks)
Dear Sir or Madam,
We are the department of Asian Domain Registration Service in China. Here I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on May 20, 2013 that a company claimed “Num & Alg Group LTD” were applying to register erikpelton as their Brand Name and some domain names through our firm.
Now we are handling this registration and after our initial checking, we found the names are 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 would finish the registration at once. But if you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we could handle this issue better. After the deadline, we will unconditionally finish the registration for “Num & Alg Group LTD”. I am looking forward to your prompt reply.
Best Regards,
XXXXXXXXXX
I first wrote about these solicitations nearly 3 years ago. Clients forward me similar messages on a weekly basis. I tell them to ignore them all. If you receive any such email, copy and paste a sentence or two from the email into a search engine and read all about others who have received the scam.
DO NOT RESPOND TO THESE EMAILS. They are a total scam as far as I know, and as far as every single report I have ever read about them. No client of mine (more than 1,800 US trademark registrations) has ever had to shut down a .CN website to do infringement. If someone else did a .CN domain name that corresponded with your trademark, it would only be a concern if the domain owner used the domain, and used it in a way that competed with your business/trademark. And if they did so, you would likely have rights under the UDRP to file a complaint and seek a transfer of the domain name.
If you have any evidence showing that these solicitations are real – and that they really relate to legitimate registration of a .CN domain name – please advise. Otherwise, stop wasting any time or energy on them.
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