Over the years, a number of our clients have reported that they have received emails from Chinese domain name vendors, stating that a third party intends to register their trade mark as a domain name under various Top Level Domain (TLD) extensions.
This form of email communication is a scam, with its intended purpose to frighten trade mark owners into registering domain names with the company that originated the email, at an inflated price. We first wrote about this scam in August 2008 and still to this day, we are seeing this type of scam being reported.
We insert below a sample of the type of email that is received by brands, although we have replaced the trade mark with 'yourbrandname'.
Dear CEO,
We are a domain name registration service company in asia, which mainly deal with international company's in Asia. We have something important we need to confirm with your company.
On Feb 22, 2022, we received an application formally. A company named "Tambora International Holdings Ltd" wanted to register the following Domain names:
After our initial examination, we found that the keywords and domain names applied for registration are the same as your company's name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it. If you do not know this company, we doubt that they have other aims to buy these domain names. Now we have not finished the registration of Tambora company yet, in order to deal with this issue better, Please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.
Best Regards,
Sherry
Auditing Department
If the email includes a domain name that you may want to secure, ensure you register it through an accredited registrar such as Lexsynergy.
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Robert White is the Head of Brand Protection at Lexsynergy and brings nearly 20 years of experience to the team