Recently a lot of our clients (and us too) have been receiving curious emails from Asian countries, mainly China. These emails are from seemingly legitimate companies who are stating that they have blocked another company’s attempt to register a domain name similar to yours. For example, they told us that someone was trying to register spikewebdesign.asia, .hk, etc.

They say that they have done their research and found that you are the holder of the trademark, which they are currently protecting on your behalf. At first this seems legit and a number of my clients have been concerned. One particular case we had just purchased a .ASIA domain for a client, then they receive an email telling them that they do not own this and it is being blocked. Then the company kindly offered to secure the domain on our client’s behalf.

Now what would have happened if our client had not asked us to sort it out and had instead consented? First, the Asian company would have contacted us ordering that we transfer the domain to them based on OUR client’s request. Then they would charge our client roughly ten times the going rate for domains, and they would sell it to them on a ten year contract, when the minimum or usual term is one year.

Now, since our client asked us to investigate these emails for them, we replied to the emails kindly declining the offer. We also noted that our client already has the domain and that there is no need for them to ‘buy it again’. This didn’t phase the Asian company. Instead they kept emailing our client, and now us too, notifying that we would lose the address unless we bought it through them.

As you can imagine our client was getting rather worried. We finally managed to make this company ‘go away’ by telling them if they sent one more email the next person they would be hearing from would be our lawyers. Of course, we heard nothing more.

Our client’s domain remained in our possession, their website kept running and we heard nothing more from this specific company.

There are many companies doing this and the best way to handle this situation is to delete the email immediately. If you are at all concerned, forward the email to you webmaster and ask for their opinion.

But remember, if someone is emailing you saying that they have possession of something which you have bought, they are almost definitely dodgy and should be ignored.