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I'd like to keep this strictly technical, don't care too much about whether it's legal or not because I'm assuming a reputable Chinese company wouldn't do anything to undermine the interests of a reputable American company.

I'm just wondering what happens to the searchability of my company if our domain is registered in Asia? We've at least got the market covered in direct searching our domain name, it would be a pity to lose that.

We are the department of registration service in China. We have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on October 30, 2009, One company which is called "Some Awesome Technologies Corp" is registering "xyz" as brand name and domain names as below:

  • xyz.asia
  • xyz.cn
  • xyz.com.cn
  • xyz.com.hk
  • xyz.com.tw
  • xyz.hk
  • xyz.in
  • xyz.net.cn
  • xyz.org.cn
  • xyz.tw

After our initial checking, we found the brand name and these domain names being applied are as same as your company's, so we need to confirm with your company. If the aforesaid company is your business partner or your subsidiary company, please DO NOT reply us, we will approve the application automatically. If you have no any relationship with this company, please contact us within 3-7 workdays. If out of the deadline, we will approve the application submitted by "Some Awesome Technologies Corp" unconditionally.

[Then there's a signature block that looks official]

Also, it would be good to know if this is a hoax. We actually have our firewall set up to block all incoming and outgoing traffic from the Eastern Hemisphere (nothing personal). I guess I can browse to the address they sent the email from, but I'm still not sure if it's legit.

HopelessN00b
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Peter Turner
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1 Answers1

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This e-mail is a scam, they are trying to get you to register those web addresses through their service at a high mark-up, disregard the e-mail and mark it as spam.

On a sidenote: if your website 'peterturner.com' is based in the USA and someone searches for 'peterturner' your website will most likely be the first result, but if someone from Taiwan searches on google.tw for 'peterturner', they might see 'peterturner.tw' as the first result, though this can vary on your pagerank and what search settings the end-user has.

gekkz
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    Yes, its a scam. Goes like this. Said registrar claims that xyz.something is being registered by another business, but would like to give ou the opportunity to register first. They make $ by signing you up for a domain in a country you dont need – Nick Kavadias Oct 30 '09 at 13:59