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Got an email at work from an agency in China specializing in regsitering online domain names. According to the email someone in China has tried to register my company's domain name and the agency wants to know if has been authorised by us. Is this genuine or is it a scam? And if so how does it work?
delete.
If you already have the domain name, someone else can't register or try to register it.
If you don't already own the domain name in question, do you care?
Common scam. We get literally hundreds of those emails a month. Bin.
How does it work then? They are not asking for money. Are they just fishing for a valid email address or will they try to get money out of me further down the line if I reply?
Presumably when you reply they say "for just £20 we can stop this".
Scam..
Delete away....
They worry you into registering a domain name similar to yours, you might have the .co.uk and not want the .com for example, and when you show interest, they'll offer to charge you over he odds to register it for you.
Could be looking for you to transfer name hosting to them also, perhaps?
In a past life I used to get them from, uh, "The Internet Registry of North America" or something similarly official-sounding, international post and everything. Some sort of worrying-but-handwavey preamble around expiring domain names which culminated in them offering to buy domain names [i]we already owned[/i] if we'd authorise them to make the transfer. Hosting fees were mental too, something like $150 per name when were were paying a fiver for two years.
But yeah. I'm certain you can file "I've received an unsolicited email from someone I've never heard of in China" straight in the spam bucket*. Do not click Go, do not give them £200.
(* - not a euphemism.)
'Kevin' called me again today, at work, about that virus my computer has... 😆