Excellent exposè of a Chinese Domain name scam. If your company receives a note that someone else is trying to buy your domain name, but with a .cn or .hk extension, this is well worth reading.
If you want to take pre-emptive action and buy those domain names now, this article tells you how to legitimately and inexpensively, buy and properly register them.
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Written by Ryan Dube
May 26, 2014
If I offered you a way to protect your car from ever getting stolen, or your house from ever getting broken into, would you pay me for it? Lots of people would — for many people, their brand is just as important as anything else. This is why Chinese domain name scams have become so popular, and so successful.
Chinese domain name scams are rampant. In a little bit, I’ll explain exactly what these scams are, but first it’s more important to understand what started them. The effort to get businesses to register for Asian domains to “protect the brand” has been ongoing for many years. It appears this became a phenomenon as early as 2006. But it has accelerated within the past year, after the CNNIC registry announced that the Chinese .CN domains were public.
While previously (since September 3rd, 2012) , you had to submit identifying documents and other personal information to register a Chinese domain; as of July 9th, 2013, those rules changed. You can now register a .CN domain as easily as any other domain, regardless of where in the world you do business. This means there’s a bit of a CN domain registration gold rush at the moment.
After these policy changes, the effort to get businesses outside of China to register .CN domain names took on a life all its own. Today, there is a massive proliferation of entities in the Asia region who are contacting unsuspecting small and large businesses across the world to register Asian domains in order to “protect the brand”. This scam targets business owners who are uneducated regarding the domain name registration process.
How the Chinese Domain Name Scam Works
For years, small and large businesses around the world occasionally received emails from individuals reportedly working for a Chinese registrar service, offering a “brand protection” package. The package includes registering a long list of Asia-related domains at a fairly hefty cost per domain.
It is a practice that marketers call “slamming”. Essentially the technique involves some collection of the following tactics:
- Informing you that some third-party company is trying to register your brand within the Asian domain realm.
- Advising you that as a courtesy, the registrar is seeking your “permission” for the third-party to register using your brand name.
- Providing you with first-option to register the Asian domains under your own brand.
- Good cop/bad cop games between the fictional registrar and the alleged 3rd party attempting to register your branded domain.
- Registrations can reportedly take place with a third party email account, so you don’t have direct access to the domains.
- Prices are either abnormally high, limited to 5 to 10 year minimum registrations, or both.
The practice of slamming has increased within the last few months, and should increase even more considering the fact these domains are now accessible to anyone.
An Email from Nicholas Lee
In early 2014, Angela shared her own experience almost falling for a Western Union Transfer scam. My experience with the Chinese domain name scam was similar. I was made aware of the existence of this scam on April 21st when an individual by the name of Nicholas Lee, writing under an email address with the domain naasreg.com and a matching footer logo contacted me.
The email advised me that a company by the name of RANTRANCE LTD was attempting to register TopSecretWriters under several top-level Asian domains like CN and HK.
Continued at http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/spot-chinese-domain-name-scam/
Filed under: China, Information operations, Security Tagged: Cybersecurity
