<< Back to Knowledge Base Overview 

Domain registration scam in China

Various companies in China are trying to scare domain owners in other countries into registering Chinese variants of their domain names by claiming some other party was trying to register these variants. Examples of this scam have been reported widely involving the domains asiaton.cn, erimut.com, erimart.com, erimart-domains.com.cn, hknsc.hk, hongkongnet.org, hk-net.org.cn, hknetwork.hk.cn and others (erimut.com, erimart.com, erimart-domains.com.cn and hknsc.hk are linked by IP address).

Such email solicitations are fraudulent, because you can safely assume that the same email, with other domains substituted for yours, has gone out to thousands of domain owners. Somebody obviously thinks being a registrar is a license to milk foreigners.

Don’t fall for this scam, they’re playing on fear.

If you own a .com, .net or national TLD (.co.uk, de., .fr, etc) domain but are not planning to set up a Chinese office or not even doing any business in China you have no reason to spend money on a domain registration with a Chinese registrar. Also, trademarks and domains are largely separate issues. You don’t become a trademark owner merely by registering a domain and vice versa.

The only domains that really count for your business are .com/.net/.org (depending on the nature of your organisation) and/or the country code top level domain (ccTLD, such as .com.au or .co.nz etc)