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Currently we have the domain name company.com (I'm using 'company' rather than our name for anonymity).

I'm getting ready to purchase several more like *.org, *.net, etc to prevent others from registering them and to avoid confusion for our users.

Now I have heard that a China company is considering registering several domains like:

company.asia 
company.cn 
company.com.cn 
company.com.tw 
company.hk 
company.in 
company.net.cn 
company.org.cn 
company.tw

A domain registration broker contacted me with this information, so I'm a bit concerned it is a scam. My thought is that this broker contacted me to try to sell these domains to me, and there isn't a "company" out there wanting to buy them.

So based on the fact that I have no trade marked name and nor do I have any patents protecting this name and I have been using it since 2004, what is the best course of action?

I should note that I have resellers of our products in China, Taiwan and Japan, so I could imagine having those domains and that being a good idea. But this is new to me so I'm not sure what to do about it.

Any thoughts?

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  • Thanks for the comments. After doing some more research, I found some more evidence that this company is trying to drum up business with fraudulent claims. It has brought up good thoughts, though, in that I may end up buying domians for countries we do business in. But I will probably not use this company ;-)
    – nicorellius
    Jan 2, 2013 at 17:50

2 Answers 2

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This is a classic domain registrar scam. Don't buy them. First off, unless you're operating in China/Taiwan/India, those domains are worthless to you. Secondly, you'll be be encouraging more such scams in the future.

What I'd do is try to trick the scammer that you are interested in registering those domains, and see if you can get them to buy all of those domains before you pay them. Then tell them you're no longer interested.

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This "domain broker" thing is a pretty common scam. They send letters or emails chock full of legalese, saying that a company (usually in China) intends to buy domains with your name. You can just ignore them.

My advice is to buy the ones you can, especially if you're planning to operate in those markets in the future. The .in TLD can be bough through GoDaddy, so snap that up. The .cn TLD is much more difficult if you don't have an office operating in China.

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