The Confident Copywriter

Posts Tagged ‘fraud’

Have you ever received one of those weird emails from overseas, claiming someone you never heard of died and left you millions?

They’re at it again.

I just received an email with an ominous subject line:

Internet copyright of TheConfidentCopywriter (To Principal)
The email stated:

Dear Victoria Ipri,

We are an organization specified at dealing with domain name dispute and registration in Asia. We have something important on intellectual property right need to confirm with your company.

Today we received a formal application from a company called B2bmarketplace International, who applied to register ” TheConfidentCopywriter ” as their domain name in some countries and Network Trademark. During our preliminary investigation, we found that these domain names’ keyword is identical with your trademark. I wonder whether you consigned B2bmarketplace International to register these domain names with us? Or is B2bmarketplace International your business partner or distributor in Asia?

Currently, we have already postponed this application of this company temporarily. Therefore please let the relevant person make a confirmation with me by telephone or email ASAP.

Best Regards,

Wanda Peng
Auditing Department(HK Office)
Tel:00852 95 66 0205
FAX:00852-3071-7730
Email:wanda@skasiadnr.net
wanda.peng@dnrcenter.hk
Web:www.asiadm.hk.cn

I immediately freaked out and began writing back to “Wanda”, proclaiming my ownership of this domain, the legalities of my business…I mean, the nerve of this B2bmarketplace, whoever they were!

Then the good angel, who never leaves my right shoulder, screamed in my ear, “Hey, Stupid! You’re giving away confidential information? Go check this company out first!”

And I did. And guess what I found?

You’re gonna love this one.

I found a blog, www.miproconsulting.com, and the wonderful Jeff Ventura, who suffered the exact same fate and wrote about it back in June 2008:

“This approach is obviously personalized to the owner/manager of a commercial Internet brand and hints at risk to our online trademark 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.”

Wow, people. This is a new one on me. I quickly erased my email to ‘Wanda’ and stashed her email in my FRAUD folder for future reference.

Thank you, Jeff! I see you have 111 responses to this email. So apparently, the tactic isn’t new; just new to me.

If it’s new to me, it might be new to you. So, to my readers who own domain names, watch out!

This is a sneak attack we all need to be aware of.

OK…you can go back to whatever you were doing now…