SEO Blog

A friend who runs another SEO shop sent me an instant message this morning with an interesting outline of a scam someone tried to play on his firm. It’s one that webmasters with a few years less experience might actually fall for.

My friend is the CEO of a well known SEO firm. He already owns the domain spread of .com, .net, .org, and the nation-specific TLD (top level domain) of his country. He recently received an email from an organization acting as a domain registrar.

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.

On October 01, 2008,we received a formal application form from HaoYun
Investment Co. Ltd who applies to register

internet trademark:XXXXXXXX (name redacted by request)

And the domain names: XXXXXXXX.asia XXXXXXXX.com.hk XXXXXXXX.com.tw XXXXXXXX.hk XXXXXXXX.in XXXXXXXX.net.cn XXXXXXXX.org.cn XXXXXXXX.tw

During our auditing procedure we find out that the HaoYun Investment Co. Ltd
has no trade mark, Intellectual property, nor patent even similar to that
word.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 HaoYun Investment Co. Ltd 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,
**** *****. Auditing Director

(contact info removed)

My friend was wondering if this might be a scam and was asking what I thought. I wasn’t sure but the head SEO of my friend’s firm was suspicious. He wrote,

I have seen something similar to this before - I suspect that her answer to
you will be to purchase those domains at some extreme cost - The company
“applying” for these probably doesn’t exist. I doubt this is legit, but who
knows…. I suppose there is an off chance that it is legit?

As it turns out, my buddy did a bit of digging and discovered that the email was in fact a scam. The company **** **** says she works with, Star East Technology with has a known history of domain scamming. (http://www.domainscams.co.uk/domain-name-scammer_14_Star-East-Technology-Ltd.php)

One backlink away is a list of known domain name scammers, many of which are based in the UK and China. Though this is hardly a comprehensive list it is worth noting.

Here’s how the scam works. The fake registrar contacts tens of thousands of webmasters per day using SPAM emails. Like all half-decent spam emails, these ones look official enough at first glance. The writing seems earnest and the writer appears to want to help the recipient protect their business name from being used with one of a wide variety of TLD’s suffixing it. Everything seems reasonable enough thus far. The thing is, the predatory company trying to grab my buddy’s domain name probably doesn’t exist. The writer is simply trying to extort money from by friend’s business.

Though this incident turns out to be a scam, one has to wonder how easily accessible this sort of scam is. There are literally hundreds of top level domains beyond the typical .COM, .ORG, .BIZ, .EDU and .NET designations. Each nation-state has one. The US-military has one. The airline industry has one. Even the Catalans and Norfolk Islanders have their own specific TLDs. I am associated with an project which uses the TLD .FM, a designation assigned to the Federated States of Micronesia but more commonly used by online radio stations. TLDs that most people have never heard of are easier to come by than one might think. Especially in China.

So that leads me to randomly typing common SEO/SEM industry domain names into my address bar adding .CN after .COM… Guess what I find in all but one SEO firm’s case… All lead to parked domains with fake search and references options. in other words, someone (or several) has purchased .com.cn domains under the business names of most of the firms in the SEM industry. One sec… I’m going to run a few more names. //// I’m back with the same results to report. ////

Hmmmm… That’s sort of disturbing but not Earth-shatteringly scary. Since most SEO and SEM shops are small to medium sized businesses and few have satellite offices located in China I sort of knew I’d get results like that. None of the cyber-squatters using any of the commonly known names is trying to pose as a working company. No potential for confusing bad scammers with good business. If someone was using OUR business name under any TLD to conduct a business, we would take immediate measures to stop them. The trick is knowing something is happening.

The potential for such confusion does exist. There are hundreds of TLDs out there. Protecting your business name is incredibly important. Keep track of your domains. The research takes a while but the pay-off is worth it.