A couple of weeks ago, we received the following email:
On 2015-10-16 08:23, xxx yyyy [we have hidden the name] wrote:

(Since it is significant, forward the following E-mail to your CEO or
relevant responsible person. Thanks)

Dear CEO/Principal,
We are the department of Asian Domain Registration Service in China.
Here I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an
application on October 16, 2015 that a company claimed “CondYmenp
Company” were applying to register “imnewswatch” as their Net Brand
and some “imnewswatch” Asian countries top-level domain names through
our firm.

Now we are handling this registration, and after our initial checking,
we found the name were similar to your company’s. Since now the
cyber-squatting events and domain name abuse are very serious, in
order to avoid such incidents cause unnecessary loss of benefits to
your company. so we need to check with you whether your company has
authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized
this, we would finish the registration at once. If you did not
authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we could
handle this issue better. After the deadline we will unconditionally
finish the registration for “CondYmenp Company” Looking forward to
your prompt reply.

Best Regards,

xxx yyyy

Soneone, she says, wants to create a version of IM NewsWatch in China, using the same business name that we use. As the representative of the ragistrar, she wanted to warn us and get our OK.

We responded, saying that this registration wouldn’t be good, since it would interfere with our trademark.

A few days ago, she wrote back, saying:

Notice: Regarding the Domain name dispute and registration case, we did not receive any of your reply until now. Concerning the mentioned Domains names and Network Brand please confirm whether you need to register those names by yourselves? If need, please let us know in time, we can send an Domain Name Application Registration Contract to you. If you think the registration of that company or the use of following domain names will not bring any negative effect to your company, I suggest you can give up these domain names, then we will accept that company application unconditionally. Further questions please contact me in time.

At this point, we decided to pursue the registration of imnewswatch.cn to make sure this contender was not able to register it. I found that it was unregistered, so I clicked “register it”, to discover that it would cost about $57 US, annually. Besides that, she said this elusive would-be registrant wanted to register several more Asian versions, too, hinting that to really protect ourselves, we would need to register 10 or more domains.

That’s not a reasonable cost, so I contacted our registrear’s help desk. The support tech reported that this is a phone call they often receive because many customers get emails like these. They are scams, a ploy to get the receiver to register the domain name with them, for a boost to their revenue.

I did a Google search on the alleged company domain and found that there are over 36,000 citations about this scam. And, since it is fictitious name, there are likely many others related to other company names they use.

This article is a caution to our readers. Be wary when someone you don’t know wants to “help” you with a matter that could ultimately mean taking your money.

Do as we did and check what is said about this entity in the search engines. Better to be sure than to waste your money on worthless “protection.”

From the 36,000 articles about this scam (we didn’t read them all), this one stood out as a clear and detailed explanation of what is going on: Chinese Domain Name Registration Scams.

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