I have received the following in my junk mail inbox:
Dear Manager:
We are a Network Service Company which is the domain name registration center in Anhui, China. On December,16th,2011, We received DATON Company’s application that they are registering the name “<removed>” as their Internet Trademark and “<removed>.cn”,“<removed>.com.cn” ,"<removed>.asia"domain names etc.,It is China and ASIA domain names.But after auditing we found the brand name been used by your company. As the domain name registrar in China, it is our duty to notice you, so I am sending you this Email to check.According to the principle in China,your company is the owner of the trademark,In our auditing time we can keep the domain names safe for you firstly, but our audit period is limited, if you object the third party application these domain names and need to protect the brand in china and Asia by yourself, please let the responsible officer contact us as soon as possible. Thank you!
Kind regards
Angela Zhang
Anhui Office (Head Office)
Registration Department Manager
Room 1008 Shenhui Building
Haitian Road, Huli Anhui, China
<removed>
The website in question is www.<removed>.co.uk and is used to promote the activities of an annual fund raising event for a local charity. As that event is held during October, activity on the site increases in the last quarter of the year as people look up the competition results.
I have looked up both gytrademark and DATON with not much relevant success and wonder if this is just a phishing exercise of some sort but don’t want to have to go through all the agro dealing with some kind of copyright issue should the email be genuine.
As you can imagine the charity is a small one, with little in the way of funds, so consulting a suitably qualified lawyer is out of the question; if the worst comes to the worst it will be cheaper to just change the website’s name.
Breath easy and go have a drink, a coke, whatever it is you like… your day just got that much better… this is a spam scam, you can google most of the email and find may results for all sorts of names about it.
Always good to check with these things however but you’ll see a lot of similar junk coming with .cn domain “searches”. I’m sure the goal is to get you to buy names from them at some silly price… but with dozens of such requests I’ve never bothered to find out.
I’ve had a few of these, too. The first one was for a domain registered to a local group, consisting of four hyphenated words, two of which were local place names. The chances of anybody in China wanting that domain were less than zero, and frankly, if they did - good luck to them. We’ve been regretting the cumbersome domain name for years.
If you’re still in doubt, visit Hoax-Slayer for still more reassurance.
Yes, just a hoax. And even though I do always check this sort of thing in sites like Hoax Slayer, even if I find nothing there, if the email/letter is not completely clear and backed up by evidence, I ignore it, because it’s their responsibility (IMHO) to make it clear what their claim is.
I get one of those (about the exact same domain) that apparently someone in China is about to register every couple of weeks. There must be about 20 companies in China that have all registered that same domain by now if the emails are true.
