{"id":600,"date":"2019-09-18T14:25:13","date_gmt":"2019-09-18T02:25:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dearjohn.nz\/?p=600"},"modified":"2019-09-18T14:42:49","modified_gmt":"2019-09-18T02:42:49","slug":"someone-has-bought-your-china-domain-name-scam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dearjohn.nz\/someone-has-bought-your-china-domain-name-scam\/","title":{"rendered":"Someone has bought your China domain name scam"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are not the only NZ business to get this email \u2014 for a scam \u2014 it\u2019s well written, and looks vaguely legit. Particularly for the non-techie business owner who may freak out that someone is trying to steal their company name.<\/p>\n

\"Chinese<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So let\u2019s unpack what they are actually saying here. They are claiming that another company is attempting to register \u201cyour\u201d domain name with a top level domain (TLD) of cn. Although this is possible, how would you know?\u00a0 And far more importantly \u2014 why would you care? There are an awful lot of TLDs<\/a> \u2014 and most New Zealand businesses register just a handful e.g. NZ, com, maybe other country-specific TLDs if they are doing business in Australia (au), the UK (uk). Most of us are not doing business in China and so don\u2019t have the cn extension. Hell we don\u2019t even own diypublishing.com \u2014 not prepared to offer US$200+ to the broker who has registered that name (a common situation for dot com extensions).<\/p>\n

Even if you have trademarked your company name<\/a> (which most NZ businesses don\u2019t attempt to do \u2014 and in many cases wouldn\u2019t be able to do) \u2014 this gives you few rights to purchase the matching domain name.<\/p>\n

Our standard advice if you are looking at developing a new business and the website is important \u2014 make sure you check<\/a> the relevant domain names are available first before you bother with a business name \u2014 which is usually much easier to find something close enough to register<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So back to the scam email. The reason this one looks so legit is that company does appear to be a Chinese domain registrar based in Shanghai \u2014 it really exists (no I\u2019m not linking to it). And I\u2019m sure they can register diypublishing.cn for us and all the others. The only real question is what are they going to charge us for it? As much as they can get away with I\u2019m betting \u2014 as we would no doubt end up in a bidding war against the fictional Chinese company mentioned who may want our domain name! I\u2019m guessing it will be a whole lot more than the US$12 that GoDaddy wants to charge us<\/a>!<\/p>\n

Fun\u00a0 random factoid \u2014 it appears to be incredibly easy to register a cn domain name \u2014 according to GoDaddy \u2014 you just need to show ID. If you want to register an au domain name you\u2019ll need an Australian Business Number and be registered as a company in Australia which matches the domain url you want! Go figure. If you are doing business with China and are considering a Chinese language website this may be a legit way to go \u2014 I\u2019d be very wary dealing with this company and their dodgy business practices though!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are not the only NZ business to get this email \u2014 for a scam \u2014 it\u2019s well written, and looks vaguely legit. Particularly for the non-techie business owner who may freak out that someone is trying to steal their company name. So let\u2019s unpack what they are actually saying here. They are claiming that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":605,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dearjohn.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dearjohn.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dearjohn.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dearjohn.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dearjohn.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dearjohn.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dearjohn.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dearjohn.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dearjohn.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dearjohn.nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}