Our clients forward this kind of thing to us a lot. Here's an example of the most recent one we've had to us personally:
(It's very urgent, Please transfer this email to your CEO or appropriate person, thanks)
Dear CEO,
We are the department of Asian Domain Registration Service in China. I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on February 23, 2012 that a company which self-styled "Arub Asia Investment Ltd" were applying to register "sentivaweb" as their Net Brand and following domain names:
After our initial checking, we have found the name were similar to your company's, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you have authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you have not, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. Out of the time limit we will unconditionally finish the registration for "Arub Asia Investment Ltd".
Best Regards, Charles Chen Tel:+86-5515223114 Fax:+86-5515223113 No.1688 Taihu Road,Baohe District,Hefei,Anhui,China
My favourite bit of this email is 'It's very urgent'. Is it now? Perhaps I'll be the judge of that, buster.
In a nutshell, you can ignore this email and get on with your day.
The more detailed explanation is that it's a scam email, intended to scare you into purchasing a host of domain names that you don't need.
By suggesting that there is another company (let's call them Tom) that is attempting to purchase the domain names listed, but with TLDs (.com, .co.uk, .hk etc) for regions that aren't relevant to you, the company who has sent you this 'urgent' email (let's call them Dick) is hoping you will leap out of your seat in outrage and insist that you are the only one who should own those domains - duly handing over the money to secure them.
However, there's no Tom. There's only Dick, inventing Tom in order to be seen to be 'protecting' your interests from him.
How do we know this?
Firstly, if the domain names are your brand only, unless you're an internationally recognized brand, they wouldn't do 'Tom' any good, even if he did exist (which he doesn't).
And I'm guessing you're not an internationally recognized brand, because if you were, you wouldn't be reading this, you would have asked one of your kettle of lawyers.
And in any case, if you DID have an internationally recognized brand, you would be able to take them to court for brand infringement and take the domains off them faster than you can say Disney.
Secondly, and probably more compellingly - we've been ignoring and advising our clients to ignore these emails for years, and no one has ever registered the domains listed.
Case closed.
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