Vox Publica

Thanks for posting this. A client received the same email and panicked. I needed to confirm my suspicion that it was a scam.

i recvd twice; 1st on Feb-18-'09 2nd on Mar-17; simmilar pattern but not identical; one from steven@dnrservice.hk while the other from max.wei@fw-chinadnr.net.

i hope the emails are really scam, if not, i'll be in deep trouble.

Thanks.

Hi, just got similar scam from address Daniel song [Daniel.Song@fw-chinadnr.net.cn]:

(If you are NOT CEO,please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent.Thanks.)

Dear CEO,

We are the department of registration service in China. we have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on March 20th, 2009, One company which self-styled "Mater Holdings, Inc" are applying to register " olympic-casino " as internet brand and CN domain names as below :
olympic-casino.cn
olympic-casino.com.cn
olympic-casino.net.cn
olympic-casino.org.cn
olympic-casino.com.au
olympic-casino.my
olympic-casino.com.ph
olympic-casino.co.nz
After our initial examination, we found that the internet brand applied for registration are as same as your company's name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it, hope to get the affirmation from your company. If your company and this "Mater Holdings, Inc" as the same company,there is no need reply to us,We will accept their application and will register those for them immediately.

If your company has no relationships with that company nor do not authorized,please reply to us within 7 workdays,if we can't get any information from yours over 7 workdays,we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by "Mater Holdings, Inc".
Thanks for your cooperation.

Best Regards,
Daniel

Senior Consultant
( ( Tel: +0086-021-37529318 ( ( Fax: +0086-021-37529316
Website: http://www.FW-chinadnr.com.cn
Address:Room515-516, No.885 Green Ark Building, East Huancheng Road,Fengxian District,Shanghai
Disclaimer:
This e-mail may constitute privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, you have received this confidential email and any attachments transmitted with it in error and you must not disclose, copy, circulate or in any other way use or rely on this information.and The company accepts no responsibility once an e-mail and any attachments is sent.

Got the exact same as notCEO from fw-chinadnr.org, so definitely looks like a scam.

Just got one of these too from

Nick Cheng
Senior Consultant
 Tel: 0086-21-37529318  Fax: 0086-21-37529316
Website:www.fw-chinadnr.com.cn

Naughty scamsters ...

The are not on the list of accredited chinese registrars at http://www.cnnic.net.cn/html/Dir/2005/10/11/3217.htm

But I guess they could still register your domains and cybersquat them. Don't know what Chinese law is on cybersquatting - punitive probably!!

I think you are not right, these company is the third largest network solutions centre in Asia, who should/will not cheated you. They should be a honest ones.

I'm being sent e-mails by someone who says they want to use my domain name internationally. How do i verify this is a scam?

I got the same email a few weeks ago. I knew from the start it's a scam but i tried to give them impression that i will pay those huge prices for nothing. They were very insistent and always giving me deadlines and i got alot of pone calls from a HK phone number.
Be carreful everyone, DO NOT PAY A CENT to those scammers.

I too received a similar mail:

From: Tina [mailto:tina@ntwifinetwork.com]
Sent: Friday, May 22, 2009 6:09 AM
To: sales@
Subject: Domain Dispute and Registration

To whom it may concern: 2009-5-22

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 "xxxxx" 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
Fax: 86 513 8532 2065
Email:Tina@ntwifinetwork.com
Website: www.ntwifinetwork.com

Mail No.:1711860

Hi
i got the exact same email, it seems like they copy and paste the email to everyone ..lol...it is 101% scam !!
ignore them !

=========================================
Dear CEO,

We are the department of registration service in China. we have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application. One company which called 'xxx Corp' are applying to register .. May 25, 2009. After our initial examination, we found that the internet brand applied for registration are as same as your company's name and trademark.These days we are dealing with it, hope to get the affirmation from your company. If your company has not authorized the aforesaid company to register these, Please contact us as soon as possible.
In addition, we hereby affirm that our time limit for dissent application is 7 days. If your company files no dissent within the time limit, we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by xxxx Corp.

Best Regards,

Jeff Xu
Auditing Department
Phone:+86-21-3752 9318
Fax:+86-21-3752 9316
www.fw-publicdomain.org.cn
Address：Room515, No.885 Green Ark Building, East Huancheng Road,Fengxian District, Shanghai, China

Thank you for sharing this, everyone..

A question comes to Mind to ask of everyone who has received this spam: Did you by any chance have legitimate (legal) correspondence with anyone internationally recently..?

Asking because I did.. May be totally unrelated but sure is a *wild* coinky-dink to have it occur less than a week later.. :)

Warmest from Talking Rock..

I received the same email from them. Now they even threaten us in case we don't pay for their domain registration:

"If you can not arrange the payment in time.We shall inform your dishonest action around world,let everyone know that your dishonest action.At least no one will doing the business in China with you.

"We shall consider re-link those Domains to other webpage including the garbage pages.
If your company can not transfer it in time we also has the rights to deal with those Domain names.
"Unilateral holder can deal with register those Domain name for it's own.

"Declare all: The damages and dissensions due to the Domain name registration we will not bear any legal responsibility.

Steven Han
Senior Consultant
 Tel: +0086-021-37529318  Fax: +0086-021-37529316

Address:Room515-516, No.885 Green Ark Building, East Huancheng Road,Fengxian District,Shanghai
________________________________________

I received the same email from them. Now they even threaten us in case we don't pay for their domain registration:

"If you can not arrange the payment in time.We shall inform your dishonest action around world,let everyone know that your dishonest action.At least no one will doing the business in China with you.

"We shall consider re-link those Domains to other webpage including the garbage pages.
If your company can not transfer it in time we also has the rights to deal with those Domain names.
"Unilateral holder can deal with register those Domain name for it's own.

"Declare all: The damages and dissensions due to the Domain name registration we will not bear any legal responsibility.

Steven Han
Senior Consultant
 Tel: +0086-021-37529318  Fax: +0086-021-37529316

Address:Room515-516, No.885 Green Ark Building, East Huancheng Road,Fengxian District,Shanghai
________________________________________

I was emailing them back to this email They almost got me :)

oscar.hu@fw-chinesednr.com
________________________________________
发件人：Chase McMichael
发送时间：2009-06-25 13:10:58
收件人：oscar.hu@fw-chinesednr.com
主题：RE: UNBOUND Domain Registration Dispute

Dear Chase,

There is several days for this case,but we did not receive any reply form you until now.For your company's Chinese domain names, we do not know how to handle it.The dispute period will come soon.Pls let us know if you need to register these domain names or not. If need, pls let us know in time, we can send an application form to you. If you think the registration of‘F&I investment inc'or the use of following domain names will not bring any negative effect to your company, I suggest you can give up to register these domain names,then we can only accept ‘F&I investment inc' application unconditionally.
Further questions please contact me in time.Thank you for your cooperation.

Following internet brand and domain names are applied for by‘F&I investment inc'
Internet Brand:
UNBOUND
Domain Name:
www.unboundtech.cn
www.unboundtech.com.cn
www.unboundtech.net.cn
www.unboundtech.org.cn
www.unboundtech.asia
www.unboundtech.hk
www.unboundtech.com.hk
www.unboundtech.tw
www.unboundtech.com.tw

Best Regards,

Oscar

2009-06-29
________________________________________
oscar.hu@fw-chinesednr.com

Thanks for posting this, and thanks to everyone else who commented. I received the same type of email and though it looked legitimate enough I couldn't figure out why I should care if someone registered our domain name with a China suffix. After all, someone could register it with a .org suffix and no one would take any notice. It's nice to know that my decision to disregard this email was appropriate.

Thanks for the post. I have a personal website, and it's not business related. I was scared that someone tried to take my domain name, but your post eased my nerves.

----------------------------------------------

To whom it may concern: 2009-7-27

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 "<domain name>" 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

Sunny
Checking Department
Tel: 86 513 8532 1087
Fax: 86 513 8532 2065
Email:Sunny@ntwifinetwork.com
Website: www.ntwifinetwork.com

I'd categorise this more as highly distasteful sales tactics rather than a scam per se as you will end up with a domain name(s) albeit at hugely inflated costs.

We receive this mail or one like it quite regularly.

We took a precaution and registered some with idotz.net for $1.95 each / year.

Kevin
CEO
www.pixelearning.com