Barely a month goes by without one of our clients contacting us about a suspect offer to sell them a domain name or an invoice-like letter from a domain “registrar” trying to get their business in a deceptive way. Most of our clients trust us to manage their domain names for this reason. One of them had been tricked into paying 3 times the going rate for a domain name they didn’t need, and unfortunately contacted us for our advice too late.

There’s a scam doing the rounds now that seems to most commonly come out of Hong Kong. This organisation is advising you that they have had someone wishing to purchase the .cn or .hk (China or Hong Kong) version of a domain name you own. And they want to check with you  first to give you the first option of buying the domain ahead of that scoundrel other buyer, trying to “steal” your corporate identity.

This one came in a few days ago…

We are a Network Solutions Organization, mainly dealing with domain name registration and internet intellectual property rights protection. On July 5, 2010 we received a formal application from a local company of your country who is applying to register some domain names with “mybusinessname” and also register the single word “mybusinessname” as their internet keyword. After investigation, we find that you are the original user of this word. As this refers to your company name or trade mark and to avoid the confusion and dispute on the internet, we are responsible to inform you of it in no time according to our policy and would like to know your ideas. If you agree about this issue, we will finish the third company’s registration. If you don’t agree the third company’s registration, please inform me. I’m looking forward to your reply. Thanks for your understanding and cooperation.

While this one doesn’t actually offer the domain to you first, if you contact them that will be the next step. A trip to this company’s website displayed what looked like a fairly typical domain registrar. Clicking around however, revealed that most of the navigation went absolutely nowhere. It was just a “shell”.

So while these people will try to sell you their asian domain names and “internet keywords” (I haven’t heard of the old “buying an internet keyword” scam for about 10 years!) if you part with your money you’ll end up with absolutely nothing in return.

If you want to purchase additional domain names please make use of our domain reseller account (under TPP Internet an authorised auDA domain name registrar) . If you buy domain names through us, it gives you the added protection of knowing a real person who cares about their clients is watching over your domain, not allowing it to expire without warning (ever had that happen? goodbye website and emails – ouch!) and providing you with personal service. And yes, the domain name is owned by YOU not us! You get your own username and password to login and manage all aspects of your domain name. If you’d rather have us do the registration for you, we will do so on your behalf, at no additional cost.