SCAM alert for website owners

I received an email that may sound scary, but I kept my calm down because I knew that is a SCAM:

Subject: About ” teoalida ” Name Disputes Internationally
ken <[email protected]>
Sat, Dec 2, 2017 at 10:06 AM

(Please forward this to your CEO or President, formal reply us the following issue within 7 workdays. Because this is urgent. Thanks)

Dear President & CEO,

This email is from China Intellectual Property Office, which mainly deal with International Trademark and Domain Name etc. Here we have something to confirm with you. Today, we received a formal application. A company named “FongKo Investment Co.,Ltd” was applying to register ” teoalida ” as its international trademark and some domain names(.asia/.cn/.com.cn/.hk/.com.hk/.tw)

We have completed the audit work, then we checked and found the name is similar to your But after our audit work, we found that the name the same as your company’s name. But this registration application is not submitted by your company. In order to avoid any potential risks on you in the future. So we need to check with you whether your company has authorized “FongKo Investment Co.,Ltd” to register the International Trademark and those Domain Name. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize. Please contact us by telephone or email within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. After the deadline we will unconditionally finish the registration for “FongKo Investment Co.,Ltd”, They will become the only legal owner of International Trademark and Domains internationally. Looking forward to your prompt reply. Thanks for your cooperation.

All the best wishes for you!

Ken Ren

Another one:

Dear CEO/Principal,

My name is Vince Hu. Our company one authorization of China Brand & Domain Name Office, mainly responsible for Domain Opposition and Brand registration, We are dedicated to providing quality domain name services with our clients and IP lawyers. We formally received an application on March 19, 2018. that a company claimed “Pitt Ltd” were applying to register “teoalida” as their Network Brand and some “teoalida” Asian countries top-level domain names(in/hk/tw/etc) and China (CN) 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. Looking forward to your prompt reply.

(This is a very important case, so please transfer this email to your CEO or Principal. Thanks a lot.)

Best Regards,

Vince Hu

Senior Consultant Manager

DO NOT reply to such emails!!

They are a mass mail sent to thousands website owners with their email addresses collected from whois database, or via robots that crawl the web for email addresses, victim’s domain name is automatically inserted in each email. The above emails were NOT received on my primary email address written in top banner image, but on an email address written in HTML code with white text specially to be not visible by humans but only by bots crawling for email addresses to spam them.

Ignoring their emails will not harm you in any way. Replying at their emails make them aware of your company, may start threatening you to register your domain name via them at an exaggerate price before that supposed (fake) company will register, if you accept, they register domain on their behalf for $10 – $20 and sell it to you for $100 – $500. This is how chinese scammers are trying to get quick rich by fooling naive people.

More articles on this subject:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_scams#Fake_trademark_protection
http://www.hoax-slayer.net/domain-name-application-scam/
https://domainnamewire.com/2017/05/04/chinese-trademark-domain-name-scam-entirety/