On a number of occasions each month, anxious clients contact us having received an urgent email, often from Chinese Domain Registration companies, informing them that a third party has applied to register a domain name that includes their trade mark. Do not act in haste and fall into the trap …
The scammers utilise publicly available information from trademark registers and advise the trademark owner that the application they have received to register one or more domain names comprising their trademark, will be processed, unless the trademark owner urgently registers the domains themselves through their registration services. The scam approaches generally read along similar lines, for example: –
“Dear CEO/Principal,
This is *** of domain name registration and solution center in China. Here I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on May 27, 2013. that a company claimed “***” were applying to register “your trademark” as their Network Brand and some “your trademark” 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, 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 “the claimed registrant”. Looking forward to your prompt reply”.
Best Regards,”
The tone of the scam approach is intended to engender panic in the heart of the trademark owner and a knee jerk response to register the domain or domains in question. For the most part, there is no need for concern and a response should not be sent to the email author. However, if the domains at issue are of commercial interest or value to you, it is recommended that a reputable and experienced domain registrar is selected and Albright IP would be happy to guide you.
