Monday Mornings… The same ritual, coffee en-route to the studio followed with firing up Spotify to set the tone for my work day and then launching my GSuite email. Trolling through all the emails there was easily 50 emails that were marketing related emails, quite a few incoming work requests and they were 3x invoices to be paid.

However, one email in particular caught my eye… the email in question, claims to be from a domain name registration entity in China. Apparently a courtesy email attempting to warn me that someone is applying to register a series of domain names based on my brand name or existing domain name. The email also hints that is a conflict with my company name and or trademark and that I should reply to confirm that the company is not a business partner of mine.

In reality they are just trying to resell domain names with Chinese/Asia extensions. These emails circulated back in 2013, the wording varies slightly, but they are designed to trick website owners into unnecessarily registering a series of domain names at inflated prices.

DACHBOARD SECURITY TIP: Unless you intend to do business in Asia or China, there is no reason to have a domain name outside of your Australian domain name (.com.au, .net.au, .org.au, .gov.au, etc).

As a website owner, I have received hundreds of such messages over several years, what’s more is my Dachboard is a combination of words (read about my company name here) and so I knew that this email was complete bogus. This was confirmed as my inbox also contained the same email from the same representative alerting me that our former business name was also targeted by the same Chinese third-party company.

If you have receive one of these scam emails, do not reply or follow any links that the email may contain. If you would like to report a scam visit the Scam Watch Australia website Scam Watch

Here’s the email below:

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From: Oliver Liu <[email protected]>
Date: 1 July 2017 at 21:22
Subject: dachboard CN domain and keyword
To: [email protected]

(Please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent. Thanks)

We are the domain registration and solution center in China. On June 26, 2017, we received an application from Jiabao Ltd requested “dachboard” as their internet keyword and China (CN) domain names (dachboard.cn, dachboard.com.cn, dachboard.net.cn,dachboard.org.cn). But after checking it, we find this name conflict with your company name or trademark. In order to deal with this matter better, it’s necessary to send email to you and confirm whether this company is your business partner in China?

Best Regards,

Oliver Liu | Service & Operations Manager

China Register (Head Office) | 6012, Xingdi Building, No. 1698 Yishan Road, Shanghai 201103, China

Tel: +86-02164193517 | Fax: +86-02161918697 | Mob: +86-13816428671

Web: www.chinaregister.org.cn

This email contains privileged and confidential information intended for the addressee only. If you are not the intended recipient, please destroy this email and inform the sender immediately. We appreciate you respecting the confidentiality of this information by not disclosing or using the information in this email.