It’s come to our attention that our clients (and Itomic!) have been receiving unsolicited emails that look like this (the grammatical errors are theirs, not ours!):
“Dear Manager,
We are a professional Internet consultant organization in Asia, which mainly deal with the global companies domain name registration and internet intellectual property right protection. Currently, we have a pretty important issue needing to confirm with your company. On Mar 18, 2009, we received an application formally, one person named ‘Jacques Dits’ wanted to applied for the Internet brand ‘itomic’ and some domain names through our body. etc, etc“.
In other words, a company is emailing you claiming that another company has contacted them in relation to registering business and/or domain names like the ones your company already owns in Australia.
Please be advised that these are auto-generated, auto-populated generic spam emails, and you are very safe to ignore and delete them. There is one positive to come out of such emails: they do alert businesses to the existence of the opportunity to register additional domain names for your company in countries other than Australia. So if your company is thinking long term and global then, subject to eligibility and availability, it’s much better/cheaper to secure your .uk, .eu (Europe), .cn (China), etc. sooner rather than later. When it’s gone, it’s gone!
Would you like to better protect your brand by acquiring non-Australian domain names?
Contact us with what you’re thinking (i.e. which countries you’d like to target) and we’re happy to advise you on availability, eligibility, and prices. The latter two often vary from country to country, where each country has the right to set the rules for its own country-level domain name.
We’re pleased to note that auDA (the official appointed domain name administrator for Australia) has also picked up on this issue, and has issued the following advisory: Misleading unsolicited emails from Asian domain name companies