Attempt at scamming a Voiceover Business

As a voiceover agency we are always alert for cons and scams but recently we received this spam - or scam - in our email inbox. The fact that it actually got through the spam filter, wasn't of the type of spam email we have all seen before and that it was personalised, took me in for a while.

Here is what it said:

"Dear CEO,

We are a domain name registrar centre in HongKong which mainly deal with the domain name registration and dispute internationally, we have an important issue to confirm with you.

1. On the August 09, we received a formal application from a company named "Brilliant International Holdings Ltd" who are applying to register "bigfishmedia" as domain names and Internet keyword.

2. During our preliminary investigation, we found that these Domain Names' keyword is identical with your Trade Mark, this is why we inform you.

3. I wonder whether did you consigned "Brilliant International Holdings Ltd" to register these Domain Names and Internet Keyword with us? Or is "Brilliant International Holdings Ltd" your business partner?

4. If you do not have any relationship with this applicant, we assume that they have other purposes to obtain these Domain Names and Internet Keyword.

Currently, we have already postponed this company's application temporarily. Pls let the relevant principal make a confirmation with me ASAP.

Best Regards,

Stars.liao

Sponsoring Registrar: Link net Service Company Limited

HongKong Office

Tel:+00852 95 660 489

Fax:+00852 30 696 940

E-mail:stars.liao@skhkdns.com.cnmailto:Stars.liao@skdmrc.org

Web:www.asia-gov.com"

After replying to state that we have no interest in registering a BigFish Media domain in other countries -seeing as we are a UK-based business, we received the following:

"Dear Sir/Madam,

According to your reply, we know your decision.So we will finish the registration of third party asap.If there are some conflicts on the internet with third party in future,we will not be involved with it.

But as a domain names registeration organization,I suggest you had better protect internet keyword. Maybe you don't need these domains,however I hope you are aware of importance of internet keyword which is a kind of network brand and a stretch of brand which can protect the right of real brand and .co.uk owner from being infringed,meanwhile,it can dispute relevant domain names once register it successfully. Including .co.uk and other domain names.That's to say,if third party register the internet brand successfully,they have right to dispute your website. However,I think both of us wouldn't like to see this would happen.We know clearly it takes very long time and funds for successful brand established.So I want to finally confirm that you decide to give it up.Please confirm and let me know.I will have to complete their registration."

By now they really should have used my name and have known that we already have the .co.uk domain and I was suspicious. Their website looks convincing but I had already decided to do an internet search on how to register the keyword BigFish Media as this is not something that I had ever heard of. And then, thanks to other people's blogs, I realised that this was a scam.

Quite what the scam is I don't know. Maybe they are just harvesting active email addresses from voiceover agencies? Or are they trying to pressure us into buying several domain names that we will never need? Or the mysterious registration of keywords. Who knows?