Dispute of network domain name and trademark from China

[frankiehots]

I recently received this crap from a place in China. Does it hold any weight? Should I do anything? Any of you ever get something like this? (note that I replaced my company with "xyz-company")

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 "Senevens Corp." are applying to register "xyz-company" as internet brand and CN domain names "www.xyz-company.cn,www.xyz-company.com.cn,www.xyz-company.net.cn,www.xyz-company.org.cn" on Nov 5, 2007. 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 15 days. If your company files no dissent within the time limit, we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by “ Senevens Corp.”.

Best Regards,

David Ding
Senior Consultant

Tel: +86-21-5271 5980
Fax: +86-21-5271 5978
Website: http://www.mipong.org.cn, www.mipong.com
Address:11/F, Building A, Oasis Plaza, 137 Bailan Road, Putuo District, Shanghai, China

[felgall]

Are you worried about someone setting up a site in China using a similar name to yours? If not then it doesn't really matter whether the query is legitimate or not.

[TheRedDevil]

Hehe, its a normal "targeted business spam" email. I receive those all the time both in email and mail format.

First, have you even have registered for a trademark in China?
If not, its another sign that they are trying to sell you something.

My guess is that if you reply, they will try to upsell those domains to you and charge premium for them.

[JCaffarella]

I work for a large apparel & footwear retailer in the US. Our web master received this same email from jack.chen@mipong.org a few weeks ago. Aside from a registered trademark, we currently don't have a presence in China, but may wish to someday engage in e-commerce there, so this email came to me from our CFO as an issue of concern. Does anyone have any further information on this matter? I just want to have some reasonable assurance that this is just another scam circulating the web before I disregard. Thanks.

[Dan Grossman]

Scam or not, all it's asking is if you object to someone else registering a .cn domain with the same name as your company. That's not really worrying...

[cheap freelancer]

Do not reply , move on.