All of the credit for this blog article goes to one of my clients who received this inquiry and did her own investigation to conclude it was a scam. This is apparently known as the “Asian Domain Registration Scam” and the company or person is attempting to trick people into registering domain names they don’t need. My client received an email from the NTWifiNetwork.com that claimed to be concerned that another person in Asia was trying to register the .com version of her domain as .cn (China), .hk (HongKong), .asia (Asia), etc. So if her business was bluewidgets.com, their was an alleged person trying to register bluewidgets.cn, bluewidgets.hk, and so forth, and the email was saying “hey, there’s someone else out there trying to register your domain name and if you don’t do anything in 5 days, we’ll process his application”. The email is posted below:

The email came from: Sunny with an address of Sunny@ntwifinetwork.com

To whom it may concern: 2009-5-27
We are a domain name registration service company in Asia,
Last week we received a formal application submited by Justin Lin who
wanted to use the keyword “_[yourdomainnamehere]_” to register the Internet Brand
and with suffix such as .cn /.com.cn /.net.cn/.hk/ .asia/ domain names.

After our initial examination, we found that these domain names to be
applied for registration are same as your domain name and trademark.
We aren’t sure whether you have any relation with him. Because these
domain names would produce possible dispute, now we have hold down his
registration, but if we do not get your company’s an reply in the next
5 working days, we will approve his company’s application
In order to handle this issue better, Please contact us by Fax
,Telephone or Email as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely
Sunny
Checking Department
Tel: 86 513 8532 2060
Fax: 86 513 8532 2065
Email:Sunny@ntwifinetwork.com
Website: www.ntwifinetwork.com

Sounds plausible? What a nice thoughtful domain registration company to let someone know when another person tries to purchase domain names similar to theirs. Except it seems to be just a scam, an attempt to get you to register domain names you don’t need.

Here’s an article on this topic that my client found on ScamWarners.com. It’s the nearly identical email spam/scam except it’s  from “Treey, Attorney at law of Legal Department”. Both emails are from ntwifinetwork.com.

Another article that discusses a similar scam attempt, but with a different company: Asia Domain Name Registration Limited. Here’s the article: Asia Domain Name Registration scam. In this case, the recipient of the email responded and was encouraged to pay between $140 – $840 for five years for each domain registration. Keep in mind domain registration is typically around $10 per year. So they were attempting to lure the email respondent into paying over 16 times more than the normal price for domain name that they didn’t need or want.

Here are some additional links that describe similar scam attempts:

Asia Domain Name Registration Limited – Scam
Asian Domain Name Fraud Warning
Asia Domain Name Registration scam

Be careful out there!

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