What is a domain name scam?

The domain name scam is a scam that encourages you to register domain names under several national extensions, often in Asia or China, at a very high rate.

As always with this type of scam, the best solution is to throw the email in question in the trash and not respond to it.

What is a domain name scam?

The scam is simple but effective, and plays on the fear and uncertainty of the recipient.

At first, you receive an email in passable but understandable English, telling you that a third party is considering registering your domain name under an Asian extension.

The sender then tells you that he preferred to check with you that this third party was authorized to make such a registration, which could infringe your rights.

The sender's email address can either be a generic email address (gmail or similar) or come from a domain name full of basic pages.

For example, this email can take the following form:

“Dear sir or madam,

We are an agency engaging in registering brand name and domain names. Today, Our Center received an application from XX And they apply to register” your domain name ” as their brand name and some top-level domain names (.CN.HK etc). We found the main body of domain names is same as your company name. I am not sure about the relationship between you and them. Please tell me whether or not your company authorizes them to register names.

We are dealing with the application and we need to confirm whether you have authorized them? If you don't authorize them, please reply to me an email. Looking forward to your reply.

Best regards,”

English is passable enough to be real, and the information is still vague enough to apply to everyone.

If you respond, you may be contacted by another email, pretending to be someone working for the third party in question.

The objective will be to try to convince you to buy the domain names in question before the third party steals them from you. Of course, these domain names will have to be purchased from the scammer at a much higher rate than the market.

It is not certain that someone who would follow the scam to the end would get their registered domain names back at a high price.

Some reckless people have pushed curiosity to the end in order to to get all the details of the scam.

Inquire about the sender of the email and do not respond

If you are in doubt about the validity of the email, you can always do a search on the sender and his company.

If the email address is sent from a specific domain, you should do a search on that domain.

In practice, however, it is unlikely that this type of email is serious. It is best not to respond to it and immediately put it in the trash.

If you want to register domain names in the extension of the countries concerned because you plan to have an activity in these countries, we advise you to do so with the organization in charge of this task in the country.

To find the organization in question, it is recommended either to use a recognized registrar, or to check the official body for the extension concerned, for example on the ICANN website.