It seems that Internet scams are alive and well in China. I’ve noticed there are a few scams going around now which has prompted me to setup a new Scams section on our blog. Many of our customers (including ourselves) have received the following email regarding the protection of their company domain name across different domain extensions. This email plays on the fears of the recipient, especially since China isn’t as strict or regulated when it comes to domain ownership.

Our Advice: Add senders domain to your list of blocked senders , and delete Jacks e-mail. 100% scam artist.

Original Mail below:
From: jack wu [mailto:jack.wu@pxsolutions.cn]

Sent: 14 July 2009 10:59
To: info
Subject: Dispute–concerning the intellectual property rights in China
Importance: High
(If you are NOT CEO,please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent.Thanks.)

 Dear CEO,

We are the department of registration service in China. We have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application. One company which called “MID Design SPA” are applying to register “PCTECHNIX” as internet brand and CN domain names as below :

- pctechnix.asia
- pctechnix.cc
- pctechnix.com.cn
- pctechnix.hk
- pctechnix.info
- pctechnix.me
- pctechnix.mobi

on July 14th,2009. After our initial examination, we found that the internet brand applied for registration are as same as your company’s name and trademark. These days we will deal with it, hope to get the affirmation from your company. If your company has not authorized the aforesaid company to register these, Please contact us as soon as possible. In addition,we hereby affirm that our time limit for dissent application is 7 days.If your company files no dissent within the time limit,we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by “MID Design SPA”.

Best Regards,
Jack Wu
Senior Consultant
Phone: +86-21-68247379
Fax: +86-21-68247376
Website: www.pxsolutions.cn
Address: Room 1501,No.12,Lane 788,Xiupu Road,Nanhui District,ShangHai,China

This letter arrived in the post recently. These scam artists from Barcelona have been doing the rounds for some time now. The letter explains that you simply need to sign the form and return it in the envelope provided (no stamp required). I suppose the nature of its simplicity is why many businesses in Ireland have been caught out by the scam. 

Once the form is returned, the business owner is hit with a bill for €987 (see bottom of form) . Worse still, they seem to be quite intent on getting this money afterwards.

My advice is simple. Firstly, if you haven’t already done so, destroy the form. Thats the simple part.

Finally, send back the envelope. You may find some comfort in the knowledge that you have cost these idiots the price of a stamp!

If it’s cheaper and quicker to setup a dot com domain name, then some people might ask why choose a dot ie address for your company domain name?

For starters, if you are an Irish Company operating mainly in Ireland a dot ie address can come across as much more credible and advantageous from a business perspective.

For example;

- Anyone can setup a dot com address in a matter of minutes. Register.com for example

• The IEDR will only approve (with the exception of personal domain names) a dot ie address if your business is properly registered. There are strict policies in place. See here for more information. You will need to provide proof along with your application which can be made and retrieved from the Company Registrations Office.
• A dot ie addresses ranks higher in regional searches. i.e Looking for an estate agent in the West of Ireland….
• There is much more availability and scope of domain names.
• Other companies will instantly recognise you as “Irish”

My advice:

Register Both! Use the dot ie address as your primary domain name for your email and website. You can then park the dot com address to yourwebsite.ie and forward all email from that domain to an email address of your choice.

Personally I cannot understand why medium to large sized Irish companies continue to use Eircom, Indigo, Gmail, etc email addresses. For that matter, I rarely understand why anyone starting a business would give this a seconds thought.

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