Trademark Domain Name Scam — Recognizing the

If you get an email like this, hit the delete button.

Let’s take a quick look at a common domain name scam that is very effective. I know it’s effective since over the past year I’ve received e-mails from smart friends who are CEOs of firms here in Austin asking if these emails are legitimate.

The scam is a trademark scam, where a firm emails you saying someone is trying to register domains that include your trademark, and wants to offer you the chance to register them first. Sometimes they are sent based on trademarks registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and other times they are based on other business filings.

The emails typically come from a firm purported to be in Hong Kong and are written in broken English. Some recent ones I’ve seen use the firm names Asian Internet Domains Register Dept and Hong Kong Network Service Firm Limited.

Here are examples of two of the e-mails, counting one I received just this morning regarding one of my trademarks. If you receive an e-mail like this, don’t take the bait.

E-mail #1
Dear Sir/Madam,

We are Hong Kong Network service Firm Limited, a domain name registration center in Asia.

Yesterday we received an application from another firm for the domain names “[trademark]” , but later we found your firm is their original owner and this may involve your firm name or trademark and this may cause confusion between your products and others’ , and bring regarding negative effect on your firm.Therefore we decided to inform you of this and check out your attitude toward this matter. We would appreciate if you can spare some precious time to settle this issue.

Thank you for your cooperation and looking forwards to your early reply.

Best Regards,
Morgan.Zhai

E-mail #2

From: Alva.Huang [mailto:Alva.Huang]
Subject: [trademark] -Intellectual property rights(To CEO)

Dear CEO,

We are a domain name registrar centre in HongKong, and in charge of the registeration in Asia,We have something notable need to confirm through your firm. We received a formal application from a firm called “SafNetwork Service holdings LLC” applying to register Inetnet brand name: [trademark]

And the domain names:
[trademark].asia
[trademark].hk
[trademark].tw
[trademark].hk
[trademark].in
[trademark].net.cn
[trademark].org.cn
[trademark].tw
……etc
in Asia on Oct.,20,2008.

During our auditing procedure we find out that the alleged “SafNetwork Service holdings LLC” has no trademark, Intellectual property, nor patent even similar to that word. as an authoritative registration organization, we have the duty to inform you this matter. If you do not know this firm, we doubt that they have other aims to buy these domain names.

Now we have not finished the registration of SafNetwork Service holdings LLC yet, in order to deal with this issue better, please let someone who is responsible for trademark or domain name contact me as soon as possible.

Best Regards,
Alva.Huang