This month, I have received several inquiries from people who received emails purporting to be about other companies trying to register domain names in Asia that correspond to their domain names or trademarks.
The emails look something like this:
Dear Mr./Ms.,
We are a service agency for registering domain names. Our center received an application from Rose Zhu International today. They applied for the registration of {your trademark} as their Brand Name and some top-level domain names. But we found the main body of domain names is same as yours. We are not sure about the relationship between you and them. As the registrar, we have the duty to inform you the case.
Now, we are processing this application. Our center needs to confirm whether this company is authorized by your company. If so, we will continue the next step of registration. If not, please let me know as soon as possible in order that our center can deal with this problem timely. We await your prompt reply.
Or they look like this:
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 {insert date} 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.
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 2,000 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.
