[Hidden-tech] "Notice of Internet Intellectual Property" messages from China?

[Robert Heller]

At Mon, 05 Aug 2013 09:21:49 -0400 Gordon Kramer <gsethkramer at comcast.net> wrote:

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> Hello,
> 
> Have any domain owners out there received a message titled something 
> like "Notice of Internet Intellectual Property", claiming to be from a 
> 'China domain name registration center'. We received a message like 
> this, that said someone wanted to register our domain name as their 
> 'internet keyword in China/Asia' and they wanted to 'confirm whether 
> this company is your distributor or business partner' in China or not. 
> We're a non profit organization without any 'business partners' 
> anywhere. Does anyone know whether or not these messages are legitimate? 
> Thank you!

It is a scam of sorts.  Here is how it works:

Typically a domain name costs between $10-$30 from a typical registar. This is
for a domain like 'domain.<TLD>', where <TLD> is one of the large number of
'Top Level Domains', which include .com, .org, .net, as well as .us (United
States), .uk (Great Britian), .fr (France), .ch (China), .in (India), .mx
(Mexico), .za (South Africa), and many, many more. A typical (small!) US
company might get a US Commercial domain name (such has my deepsoft.com), but
in *theory* there are lots of possible *similar* domain names: deepsoft.uk (if
I had a British office) or deepsoft.za (if I had a South African branch) or
even deepsoft.cn (if I had an office in Bejing). So, an 'enterprising'
chinaman pays the chinese version of GoDaddy (godaddy.cn maybe) US$10 for
deepsoft.cn and would love to get me into a bidding way and end up paying him
US$100 (or US$1000) for deepsoft.cn. Not bad for a days work sitting in an
Internet Cafe in front of a laptop, esp. if you are doing this with a dozzen
or so US comanies at the same time. I just got an E-Mail about someone wanting
to know if I wanted to bid on softdeep.cn or some such. Not only are there
domain names where the .com (or .net or .org) is swapped out for .ch or .in or
.mx or .za, but domain names that are 'near misses' of your original domain -
simple mispellings, word swaps, and so on. In theory, for any given domain
name, there are *hundreds* of close variations -- all are potientially up for
grabs.

So what is happening is someone (probably a teenager) in China wants to get 
you into a bidding war for a version of your domain name in the Chinese TLD.

For a company like Coca Cola, it is no big deal to snap up all variations of
cocacola.(every TLD, except mil, gov, and edu). Almost all of the big
companies do this as a matter of course, since they can afford to go to
GoDaddy and buy up all of the domain names even remotely like their trademark.
Most small companies or organization cannot afford to do this.

There really isn't anything illegal or anything about this, it is more a way
to bilk some cash from 'rich' Americans. It depends to some extent how much it
matters to have a version of your domain name on the chinese TLD (or some
other 'exotic' / 'foreign' TLD). The most that will happen is that the domain
name will be parked and carry foreign advertising for a year.

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-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software        -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
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