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Dear CEO/Manager,

We are a domain name registration center in Hongkong,mainly dealing with domain name registration and internet intellectual property rights protection. On October.5,2009 we received a formal application from a local company of your country who is applying to register some domain names with the keyword “investmentpropertycalculator ” and register it as their keyword. After investigation,we find that you are the original user of the keyword. As this refers to your company name or trade mark, and in order to avoid the confusion and dispute on the internet, we inform you 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 to register, please inform me.looking forward to your reply.thanks for your understanding and cooperation.

Look forward to your reply.

Thanks

Kind Regards,

Diana Mill

Address: 19/F., First Block, New World Bldg.,
No.18 Quen Middle Road,
Zhonghuan,
Hong Kong

Tel: +852-31757931(ext8003)

Fax:+852-31757932

Email:Diana.mill@hknsc.org

Website: http://www.hk-net.hk

This is HK Net Law Co,.Ltd (www.hkh.hk.cn ), professional provider of application inquiries service and internet intellectual property protection for Domain name registration and Internet keywords.

We received a formal application from another organization are applying to register ” springworks”on july 30 2009. After investigation, we find that you are the original user of the keyword. As this refers to your company name or trade mark, and in order to avoid the confusion and dispute on the internet, we inform you and would like to know your ideas, Hence we need you confirmation.

Secondly,If your company have nothing to do with (www.esahmi.cn) another organization , they maybe have other purposes to register these domain names and internet Keyword.

This is a letter for confirmation. If we haven’t receive your reply. We will automatically confirm application from another organization after this audit procedure.

Faithfully,

Paul.li

Customer Service Manager

Hong Kong office:
Tel:+852-30657273
Fax:+852-30502075
Address:No.67-71,Chatham Road South,Tsim Sha Tsui,Kowloon,Hong Kong

HK NET Law Co Ltd
E-mail:paul.li@hkh.hk.cn

http://www.hkh.hk.cn

To update the whois of your own domain you may need to login to you own domain name registrars control panel and update the information from there. No need to click any links in the email (There aren’t any)

If you DO NOT own or manage a domain, it means that someone has used your email address for their domain name’s Admin / Technical / Billing contact information.

Either way, you need to take action. Either report this to ICANN or keep your whois data up to date.

From: domain@nswebhost.com

Dear Domain Holder,

This message is a reminder to help you keep the contact data associated with your domain registration up-to-date.

As of October 31, 2003 we are required by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to send you this reminder by the Anniversary date of each registered Domain Name that is subject to the terms and conditions of that organization.

Below is a list of domain names with your email address listed as the registrant or administrative contact. The current contact information associated with the domain may be verified by following the link provided.

If any of the contact data is inaccurate, it must be corrected. If you need assistance in accessing your account to make these updates, please reply to this email. If the contact data is accurate, no further action is required to comply with this notice.

Please remember that under the terms of your registration agreement, the provision of false Whois (contact) information can be grounds for cancellation of your domain name registration.

Domain Names with Anniversary Dates between August 1 and August 31

And some doggy links at the end which marked as red flags.

A couple of good websites for checking scammers
http://www.who.is
http://www.dnscoop.com/

Hope you guys don’t get caught!

There can be no claims against a name. For example if I own jacobscompany.com and registered it first then you can’t go to ICANN and claim that it is your name and you should own it. That’s not how it works. All you have to do is to wait till it gets expired and I don’t renew it. It then gets released for registration or gets reserved (by third parties) for big money demand upon claim for popular domain names.

Although the TLD’s of a specific country such as .com.pk, .com.au, .com.ae etc are managed by the local Governments and they allow the facility to claim the domain name if you own the business with the same name. For example if I own jacobscompany.com.pk domain name and “you” have a business in PK by the name Jacob’s Company then you can officially claim that this “should” belong to you by writing them on your company’s letterhead. They will give the domain to you. That’s how it works on country-based domains (as far as my country Pakistan is concerned, I’m not much sure about other countries)

Maybe the hongkong people used this to fool everyone using a global TLD (.com .net etc). I think there is nothing to worry about. Still if you feel like making really sure you should contact ICANN http://icann.org/ as this is one of just a few organizations that manage global TLDs.

I feel like I am now part of the serious design community.

Hooray.

In accordance with the regulation of our country, we are working for the protection of intellectual property with our clients. Net trademark is part of intellectual property rights, so I strongly suggest that you register to protect this net trademark. If you confirm to register, I will send an application form to you. If you have any questions or requirement, please contact me.
Best regards,
Stacy.huang
==========
after that, she tried to scare me again saying that i only have 15days to decide. after reading this post, i told her that i’ve confirmed that HK N R S is running a scam and that not to contact me again. lol.

Thanks Jacob for posting this!

It was really odd that a client of my husband received the same email that day (and a good thing for both of us—confirmed it’s spammy nature in my mind). Good idea to post about this, Jacob, to help get the word out.

Here were the contact details from mine (just in case people are doing a search!):

Jkpen
IT Director

Auditing Department
Tel: +852 2297-9279 ( Direct )
Fax: +852-2297-9209
Email: Jkpen@eworld.hk
Web: Http:www.eworld.hk

schacter.ji@cntls.org
Tel: +86 10-80749561
admin@cntls.org
http://www.cntls.org/

Check out there BAD photoshop work on fake certificates:
http://www.cntls.org/html/ClientsInfo/

hug,
IS

Hyder,
Thanks for your link out and warning.

TBD,
Thanks for the explanation!

Alberto, Peter, Jason,
You’re welcome.

To Peter — don’t feel stupid… I nearly did the same — but the $$$ stopped me and something in my gut !

wow i feel stupid!!

thanks for sharing jacob…

Beware!!!

I’ve gotten a similar email once. I let my domain registrar know about it just so they can track anything like this that may happen to others.

Here’s my blog post on it – Chinese Domain Name Scam

I have been silently reading your blog in the background for some months now and have never commented but I feel that this post has given me the nudge I needed.

I have just started my own personal blog and think its great that you have pointed out this scam to fellow un-suspecting bloggers, I for one will definitely be steering clear of it!

Thanks again and keep up the good work Jacob!

Marco,
Thanks for taking the time to share with us your experience.

Chris,
You’re welcome and all the best with your career.

Micheil,
Probably not a wise idea.

Luis,
I wasn’t entirely sure what it was, I thought originally that it could have been another countries law but obviously not.

Rommel,
Soon as you get rid of one, another will just pop up under another name.

Petrik,
I’ve had a few people thank me for telling them about this (via email) so I don’t believe it is wasting energy, but rather helping others but I do understand what you mean. More focus on design.

Basically, what the spammer did is already against the law (this is much worse than a simple drug spam) and this type of scam can be considered as Internet crimes (dishonest plus money involved).

The problem these days is not they getting wiser and wiser, but because we tolerated them along the way, the governments should really do something similar to the piracy laws to actually reduce this type of cyber crimes.

I found a government site, not sure if is helpful to some of you. http://www.ic3.gov/

Fight back when you can.

I had to laugh because my car is a 1998 model year meaning it is now 11 years old and the warranty is long over any possible extension.

The FTC is cracking down on these guys now.

And Twisty is right, no one in Hong Kong has any authority over .coms. Verisign was the master of all .com gTLDs and will continue to be so indefinitely after they gave up control of .net and .org in a deal with ICANN.

Please stop wasting you energy with this and continue putting it into your fine work on your site.

I have had numerous of these as well as similar schemes by snail mail.

Just looking at the discrepancies is a dead give away.
The applicant gets it forever and you get it for 5,10 or 20 years???? And when the price comes through you’d still consider paying Thousands for something that would normally cost a few teners.

“…the applicant will get the registration and own it legally for ever.”

“Now I send you the registration procedure and service fee.
The price is 1118USD/one/5years, 2000USD/one/10years, 3680USD/one/20years.”

We have a similar fax scheme happening here, a company claims you have advertised on their site and now your renewal is overdue, please pay immediately or it will be sent to the debt collector. That crowd is being investigated by our governments fraud department and so far we’ve not seen any more, no doubt they’ll resurface in another incarnation.