Brand name dispute - Chinese scam?

[zarathustra]

I just received an email, that reads:

"We are the department of registration service in China. We have something which needs to confirm with you. We formally received an application on 15, Mar 2011. One company called "Neoco Trading Co., Ltd" is applying to register " *My domain name*" as Brand name and domain names as below:

They go on to list the name of my website, but with Asian extensions, then state:

"After our initial checking, we found the brand name and domain names being applied are as same as your company! So we need confirmation with your company. If the aforementioned company is your business partner or your subsidiary, please DO NOT reply us, we will approve the application automatically. If you don't have any relationship with this company, please contact us within 5 workdays. If over the deadline, we will approve the application submitted by "Neoco Trading Co., Ltd" unconditionally."

-------

Foolishly I did reply, but then I googled the the email from chinesenic.net, and found mention of this email on a number of scam sites. How does this work exactly - do they try and blackmail you, or try to get your domain name from you?

 

[Stephen]

don't send money, ensure you don't let your domain expire

 

[zarathustra]

Thanks Stephen - I certainly would never dream of parting any money with them, and rest assured I won't be letting the domain expire. I should have guessed it was spam when I first saw it.

 

[hafa]

They're just trying to con you into buying insanely overpriced .cn domains from them. Typical phishing using whois registries...

 

[nzkiwi]

Do a search in Google for "We are the department of registration service in China" to see how often this question comes up.

 

[zarathustra]

Thanks Hafa and NZKiwi - I did think to google it (after I posted here unfortunately), and that's when I discovered how big the scam was.