Categories
End User internet

Domain name scam

Another domain name scam email came in overnight. I’m told that a number of customers have had similar ones in recent weeks. My advice is to ignore these emails unless you have business aspirations in the Far East in which case you will probably already have your domain registered. I’ve reproduced the email here because it is mildly amusing to those of us who have not yet fully grown up.

Dear Manager,

We received a formal application from a person who is called Jacques Tits is applying to register “timico” as their domain names and Internet brand in Hong Kong and also in Asia on 2009-02-27. During our auditing procedure we find out that the alleged Jacques Tits has no trade mark,brand nor patent even similar to that word.As authorized anti-cybersquatting organization we hereby suspect the alleged Jacques Tits to be a domain or trademark grabber.Hence we need you confirmation for two things.First of all,whether this alleged Jacques Tits is your business partner or distributor in Asia.Secondly,whether you are interested in registering these domains and Internet brand instead of that alleged person.(The alleged Jacques Tits will be entitled to obtain a domain not needed by original trademark owner.)

If you are not in charge of this please forward this email to appropriate dept.

This is a letter for confirmation.If the mentioned third party is your business partner or distributor in Asia,please DO NOT reply.We will automatically confirm application from your business partner after this audit procedure.

Best Regards,

Registration Commissioner
Sponsoring Registrar:Asia Network

Categories
Business internet security

“Stealing” domain names is just not cricket

Businesses need to be mindful of the need to manage their domain name strategy sensibly. There are any number of individuals and organisations out there ready to take advantage of the careless.

For example take a look at http://www.cricinfo.com/. Not a bad time to be visiting the site during an exciting match between England and South Africa (yes I did say exciting).

If you now visit http://www.crickinfo.com/ you will see a difference. The spelling mistake is an easy one to make for someone looking for the main cricket website in the world (wide web). A good domain name strategy would have seen cricinfo snaffle both domains.

Now visit http://www.cricinfo.co.uk/. This one you might think would certainly take you to cricinfo but it doesn’t. It is owned by someone else and until recently took people to a cricket shop completely unassociated with cricinfo.com.

This is quite a high profile example of someone not doing something right when the business was small and it didn’t matter but paying for it downstream.

There are other different examples – the famous myspace court case where the .co.uk domain name was owned by an ISP long before myspace.com existed.

It is quick and easy to check your own business’ domain name – click here if you need a domain name checker.

Good luck England.

Categories
End User internet

"Stealing" domain names is just not cricket

Businesses need to be mindful of the need to manage their domain name strategy sensibly. There are any number of individuals and organisations out there ready to take advantage of the careless.

For example take a look at http://www.cricinfo.com/. Not a bad time to be visiting the site during an exciting match between England and South Africa (yes I did say exciting).

If you now visit http://www.crickinfo.com/ you will see a difference. The spelling mistake is an easy one to make for someone looking for the main cricket website in the world (wide web). A good domain name strategy would have seen cricinfo snaffle both domains.

Now visit http://www.cricinfo.co.uk/. This one you might think would certainly take you to cricinfo but it doesn’t. It is owned by someone else and until recently took people to a cricket shop completely unassociated with cricinfo.com.

This is quite a high profile example of someone not doing something right when the business was small and it didn’t matter but paying for it downstream.

There are other different examples – the famous myspace court case where the .co.uk domain name was owned by an ISP long before myspace.com existed.

It is quick and easy to check your own business’ domain name – click here if you need a domain name checker.

Good luck England.