Binary Kitchen

Domain name owners, beware of evil scammers these days. Currently a campaign of spam coming from China is on the raise. Their trap is to persuade domain name owners to buy more domain names. This can happen to everyone, even to professional IT guys like you and me. That strange email from a Larry Lee of a Hong Kong was adressed to me and put me on high alert. Luckily I made some background checks and discovered lots of dirt in that Asian mud.

Their trick is to suggest domain name owners in a forcing manner to buy all domain names before another business is grabbing them. These scammers usually give you a 48 hours time window to buy these at a much higher price which is their profit. For example I own www.binarykitchen.com and their offer is to sell me binarykitchen.cn, binarykitchen.jp, binarykitchen.net and so on before another company is buying these in the next 48 hours. They told me, that this  "another" company called Cononation Holding Ltd (a fictious domain name investment company) is interested in these domain names and they give me these 48 hours to dispute against them before it's too late.

The security company firetrust has already warned about this kind of domain name scam two years ago. I quote the last phrase of their blog entry: "It’s a scam, it’s dodgy, it's unsolicited, and the outright lies from these companies should encourage you to never do business with them."

So here some advice I want to share with you:

1. Better be safe than sorry. Double check the integrity of such strange emails by checking the domain name of the from field. In my example it was "Larry@netservice.hk" - so browse to www.netservice.hk and you'll get a lovely HTTP 401 error which means there is no website implemented.
2. Protect your business name. I can't emphasize enough the importance to register it and to protect your trademark within the Intellectual Property Information Service of your country.
3. Don't ever get scared by emails forcing you to buy something. Never ever.

At last, against my better judgement, I replied to them that their email is a bad hoax and that they should stop their unethical business. Their response is:

"Dear Michael Heuberger,

You can think it is a hoax. Because such case happened frequently and your caution is reasonable. I need to remind you that if you give up, I will finish the registration for them within 48 hours. I think that my work have been done well.

Best Regards,
Larry Lee"

You see, they don't stop scaring you and try everything to make you buy these domain names.