This morning, a client forwarded me an email it received from a company ostensibly doing business in China. The email read as follows:
RE: Intellectual property rights
Dear CEO,
We are the domain name registration organization in Asia, which mainly deal with international company’s in Asia. We have something important we need to confirm with your company. On the April 14, 2008, we received an application formally. One company named [Fake Company] wanted to register following Domain names:
clientstrademark.asia
clientstrademark.cn
clientstrademark.com.cn
clientstrademark.com.hk
clientstrademark.com.tw
clientstrademark.hk
clientstrademark.tw
Internet Trademark: clientstrademark
through our body.
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 aims other than to buy these domain names. Now we have not finished the registration of [Fake Company] yet, in order to deal with this issue better. Please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.
My client’s question: “Is this real?”
My response: “No.”
Later in the day, another client forwarded me a similar email from a purportedly different Chinese company. We’ve periodically gotten emails like this in the past, but this seems to be turning into an epidemic. At best, these messages are overly-aggressive attempts to drum up business by scaring trademark owners into registering domain names they don’t need. At worst, they’re outright fraudulent.
For instance, on Monday a client called me about a bill he received from an overseas company for work it allegedly had performed to obtain a “world trademark registration.” My client was relieved to hear it was a scam. He would have been less happy to get that news if he had already paid the bill. Beware!