In This Morning’s Inbox: Clever Domain Name Spam
I found this waiting for me in my inbox this morning. Fun!
Dear CEO,
We are a domain name registrar centre in HongKong.and in charge of the registeration in Asia.We have something important need to confirm with your company.
We received a formal application from a company called “sa-lar yun Investment Corp” applying to register
Internet trademark:
Miproconsulting
Domain names:
miproconsulting.asia
miproconsulting.biz
miproconsulting.cc
miproconsulting.cn
miproconsulting.com.cn
miproconsulting.com.tw
miproconsulting.hk
miproconsulting.net.cn
miproconsulting.org.cn
miproconsulting.twin China and also in Asia on Jun. 23. 2008.
During our auditing procedure we find out that the alleged “sa-lar yun Investment Corp” has no trade mark, 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 company, we doubt that they have other aims to buy these domain names. Now we have not finished the registration of sa-lar yun Investment Corp 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,
Hayee
Auditing Department
SK Holdings, Ltd.
This is clever and it took a bit of time to figure out the pathology. But there is one, and it’s interesting.
This approach is obviously personalized to the owner/manager of a commercial Internet brand and hints at risk to our online trademark (miproconsulting) due to a foreign application being made for our trademark name in country-specific flavors (.asia, .biz, .cc, .cn, .com. cn., .hk, etc.). Being the nice foreign domain registrar they are, the sender of this message, SK Holdings, is asking us if we want to do business with them and secure all of the miproconsulting variants listed below so that we can protect our Internet brand from this foreign applicant.
Isn’t it nice that someone halfway across the globe is looking out for our best interests? Makes me want to do business with them right away.
There are many versions of this floating around the web, most of which have Chinese senders. Seems they’re really advancing their pretexting game. Hooray.
If you’ve stumbled across this yourself, paste a copy of the email you received in the comments. Like other spam of this ilk, there are likely countless variants out there.
