Hi All,<p>Someone has been sitting on octopart.cn and octopart.com.cn for over a year now. Occasionally they send us an email to ask us if we want to buy them back. Yesterday we received an email from public-domain.net.cn which claims to be a domain name registrar in China. They said someone is trying to register our brand with them and they wanted to verify it with us. I'm attaching the email below.<p>Has anyone on HN received a similar email from public-domain.net.cn? Previously when we posted about the cybersquatters, other people on HN said they had gotten emails from them as well.<p>Thanks,
Andres<p>Dear CEO,<p>We , a registrar organization in China, have something to check with you. We received an application on Sep. 9th. One company called "Repet Trading Co. Ltd" is applying for "octopart" as internet brand and following Asian/.CN domain names to use.
octopart.asia
octopart.com.tw
octopart.hk
octopart.net.cn
octopart.org.cn
octopart.tw<p>After checking, we found the internet brand and keyword of these domain names are as same as your company’s, so we need to check this with your company.<p>If the aforesaid company is your subsidiary company or your business partner, please DO NOT reply us, we will approve the application automatically. If you have no any relationship with this company, please contact us within 7 workdays. If out of the deadline, we will approve the application submitted by " Repet Trading Co. Ltd " unconditionally.<p>Best Regards,<p>Louis Hua
Lead Checker
This is a standard tactic. This company, and a few others (possibly the same, with different names), regularly make this kind of claim. It is a more refined form of spam...similar to the letters that a few American registrars send out trying to get you to transfer your domains by warning you of impending expiration of your registration.<p>In short the letter you received is a marketing letter. They want to register those domains for you, and are using a very clever and underhanded tactic to do so. When we first got an email like this, I was able to dig up quite a bit of information with a few minutes of Googling. A couple of our users also received similar letters, about some of their domains and the response from one of our customers based in China (who I've known for several years, and would generally trust--his statements were backed up by a native of China, who I don't know as well) indicated that domain registration in China is an ugly business and fraught with fraud...he indicated that if you couldn't get an honest agent within China to represent you in the process, you'd almost certainly get screwed on the deal. I tend to believe that anyone that would send emails like the above probably are not honest agents who would represent you faithfully in the process. Though maybe just getting your money for the registration(s) would be enough motivation for them and they don't plan to do anything underhanded.<p>But, by expressing enough interest to spend money on the domains, you'd probably be merely notifying them that squatting on these domains is likely a profitable venture. I'm certain the two companies ("Repet Trading Co." and public-domain.net.cn) are related in some way.