Just a quick note that this domain name scam continues to propogate. First time I saw it was last year but there are postings all over the Internet about this domain name scam. Here’s the question that came in from one of my clients:

“I need some advice from someone who knows more than I do about these things. As you can see below a company, which we cannot find out anything about, is about to use my domain all over Asia. At the moment and in the near future I do not plan to go to Asia with my work, however I am thinking that to say nothing could be a problem for me. Do you have any thoughts?”

And, here was the email she received. For her privacy, I kept the domain name out, but the message is important to identify with in case you get one too:

Dear President,

We are the department of Asian Domain registration service in china. we have something need to confirm with you. we formally received an application on October 7, 2010. one company which called “Sitar Holding Inc.” are applying to register “herdomainname” as Brand name and the following Domain Names:
herdomainname.asia
herdomainname.cn
herdomainname.com.cn
herdomainname.com.hk
herdomainname.com.tw
herdomainname.hk
herdomainname.in
herdomainname.tw

After our initial examination, we found that the Domain Names applied for registration are as same as your company’s name and trademark. these days we are dealing with it, hope to get the affirmation from your company. if your company has not authorized the aforesaid company to register these, please contact us as soon as possible.
In addition, we hereby affirm that our time limit is 7 workdays. if your company files no reply within the time limit, we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by “I’ve removed the company name so as not to give them any more publicity!”.

I found a very interesting blog post about this issue that was posted back in 2008. Amazing that it’s still relevant today.

So, there you go. If you get an email like this, don’t worry about it. It’s a scam. And, I support the blog post’s mentioning that the most important domain names you need to own are still your .com, .org, .net, .us, and maybe squeeze in a .co if you have some cents still in your budget. Beyond those, you really don’t need to worry about registering multiple out-of-country domains unless of course you are in another country than the U.S.