In the last few weeks I got notices several times about companies wanting to register my name in China. I have researched it and this is what I found
Many businesses and private domain owners have received emails from a company in China or elsewhere in Asia recently telling them that someone in China or another country in Asia has requested to register their domain name and use of it as a keyword in China or whatever country. It states they found you are the registered domain owner and as that are the legal trademark holder in China and you need to let this registrar know or they will sell your Chinese domain name.
This is a phishing letter. They are not contacting you to protect you but in turn to ask for financial information so they steal your money. I received one of these letters for dwightwatt.com domain which I do own and a little checking by a legitimate outfit would not write me concerning my “dwightwatt business”. If you get one of these emails trash it and do not respond to it. If you do respond, notify all financial institutions that you have answered a scam so they can put holds on your accounts.
The second part is saying you will lose your rights to using your name as a keyword. There is no registration of keywords. There are some products that are out there do use a keyword but none of the browsers support that. Basically it is like AOL was back originally before merged in with Internet and companies had a specific word but every one uses domain names now except Chinese using a specific software, and as they open more to Internet it will die. We use keywords now as as a list of terms in the header of document that tells how it should be indexed. Google and other search engines do work to try to keep people from using misleading keywords so they may use all you list and they look for meaningfulness also to the page.
Watch out for any emails concerning banking, domain names, etc for being phishing. This is just the latest variety of the Nigerian emails which date back to pre-email by use of snail mail (I have heard recently some are now doing phishing attempts again using regular phone and USPS mail.
Dwight
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