Watch out: the Chinese domain registration scam is getting slicker

Scams involving the registration of Internet domain names in China have come and gone over the last ten years or so. The scammers probably target the email contacts of registered DNS names – this information is usually publicly visible.

What typically happens is that the victim receives an email that purports to be from a Chinese domain name registrar. The email says that some company has applied to register a .cn domain whose name matches some part of the victim’s domain name. In my case, the email said that a Chinese company wanted to register the domain kevinboone.cn. There isn’t the slightest reason why any company would want to do this, and I don’t care if one does; but I can see why the owners of businesses might pay attention to this kind of warning.

If the victim expresses concern, the scammer offers to register the victim’s domain name in China, giving him preference over the alleged original applicant. If the victim accepts such an offer, the scammer will ask for money to effect the registration. Usually, the price is ludicrously high: hundreds or thousand of dollars. Registering a .cn domain through a legitimate registrar only costs about $10. The scammer generally takes the money and does nothing more.

For many years, these scams were pretty transparent.

Usually the scammers’ emails used terrible English, full of spelling and grammar mistakes.
The email address of the sender clearly wasn’t a proper business – it would be something like reg_cn@gmail.com.
The email usually asked for a money transfer, rather than directing the reader to a legitimate payment service.
If the email referred to a website, the URL of the site was clearly that of some free web host.

But things have moved on. Here is one of the emails I received recently.

First, and most obviously, the email address is not a generic GMail one: it has a real domain (domainregistry.org.cn). I was able to carry on an email conversation with mike@domainregistry.org.cn, whoever he really is.

“Mike Zhang” addresses me by my real name, not Dear domain owner or Dear CEO, as we used to see. I certainly got the impression that I was dealing with a real person, not a computer.

The English of the email is not perfect, but it’s as good as the English of most Chinese folks I deal with professionally (and a million times better than my Chinese).

Most problematically, there really is a website at domainregistry.org.cn, and it looks very slick – like the site of any real Internet service provider. For all I know, it might provide real services. Of course, I’m not going to send money just to find out.

It continues to blow my mind that so many scams are so transparently obvious. When I answer the telephone, to hear a robotic voice tell me “this is bank secure department”, I have to laugh. Surely nobody would fall for that? I guess people do, though, in the same way that some people still fall for the ‘Nigerian prince’ scam, even after all these years.

But with this latest round of Chinese domain name scams, well, I don’t think there’s any shame in being caught out. They’re that good. I wasn’t fooled, because I’d seen the scam before and, in any case, I don’t care who uses my domain name. But I can see how a small business, particular one that was considering doing business in China, would be taken in, and couldn’t really be blamed.

In a way, I have to respect the scammers. They’ve clearly worked hard to make the scam as convincing as it is. In fact, I can’t help wondering whether people who have the skills to do this, might make more money from legitimate employment?