14

May

Daily Junk: a Man in China is Stealing Your Brand

Posted by: Jeremy Reither

This latest junk email I received was from a domain registrar in China. The claim was that some guy (“Justin Lin”) was trying to buy a bunch of Chinese “R3R” domains (like r3r.cn, r3r.com.cn, r3r.net.cn, etc.). The message from this registrar representative (Tina) was supposedly a courtesy outreach - just to ask if I had any concerns about this domain purchase had been attempted. Her request was that I reply within 5 days to indicate whether I authorized Mr. Lin’s purchase.

Here’s the real deal: Tina wants me to buy these Chinese domains from her out of fear that someone else may buy them first. It’s a scare tactic.

Let’s just ignore for a second that this email is coming from China (a huge tip these days that the email may be something less than legitimate.) It’s like getting “free money” from Nigerians on Craigslist. 

When I first read the email I thought for a second, “huh, that’s strange. Why would someone want to buy all these R3R domains.” But give me a break! The real question is, why would any domain registrar bother to contact me when someone is attempting to purchase domains from them. No registrar could possibly have part of their business process the requirement to put domain purchases on hold while they investigated trademark infringements. They would be out of business before you could blink.

So, before you think “wow, I’m lucky they contacted me before Mr. Lin bought all these Chinese domains with my brand name,” ask yourself what’s in it for the email sender. I this case, what does ntwifinetwork (a Chinese company) stand to gain by notifying you (a non-customer) of some possible trademark infringement? Nada. Zip. Zero.

Here’s the actual email:

From: Tina@ntwifinetwork.com
Sent: Thursday, May 14, 2009 1:48 AM
Subject: Domain Dispute and Registration

To whom it may concern: 2009-5-14

We are a domain name registration service company in Asia,
Last week we received a formal application submited by Justin Lin who wanted to use the keyword “r3r” to register the Internet Brand and with suffix such as .cn /.com.cn /.net.cn/.hk/ .asia/ domain names.

After our initial examination, we found that these domain names to be applied for registration are same as your domain name and trademark. We aren’t sure whether you have any relation with him. Because these domain names would produce possible dispute, now we have hold down his registration, but if we do not get your company’s an reply in the next 5 working days, we will approve his company’s application.

In order to handle this issue better, Please contact us by Fax ,Telephone or Email as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely,

Tina
Checking Department
Tel: 86 513 8532 2060
Email: Tina@ntwifinetwork.com
Website: www.ntwifinetwork.com
Mail No.:1599864c

By the way, what is a “Checking Department?” Couldn’t they think up a better name? If you’re going to be that lazy, why not just call it the “Double Checking Department?”