Slamming
 

Apparently that's the term used for this practice.

I am sure Webmasters like Paul are well aware of this but the last few weeks is the first I had come across it.

You will have an Email sent to you using the mail address on your web site.

An example of the mail is below:


Dear CEO/Principal,

This is Vince Lee---Senior Consultant of domain name registration and solution center in China. Here I have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on July 4, 2017. that a company claimed "Berries Ltd" were applying to register "cossor" as their Network Brand and some "cossor" Asian countries top-level domain names(in/hk/tw/etc) and China (CN) domain names through our firm.

Now we are handling this registration, and after our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company's, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we would finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we could handle this issue better. After the deadline we will unconditionally finish the registration for "Berries Ltd". Looking forward to your prompt reply.

(This is a very important case, so please transfer this email to your CEO or Principal. Thanks a lot.)

Best Regards,

Vince Lee

Senior Consultant Manager

What they are after is for buy up all of these unpopular extensions at inflated prices to "protect" your brand/web presence.

They are obviously lazy or they would realise that my website has no commercial element but I guess they work on quantity not quality.

I typed in by hand the web address on the Email and it passed a security scan and it is actually a commercial provider of web domains.

Clearly trying to drum up business :angry:

Cheers

Mike T

Cheers

Mike T

Re: Slamming
 

I had a cossor.co.uk email address once, rapidly replaced with a Raytheon.co.uk :( ... was a valid brand once. Wonder if they still own the trademarks somewhere.

This is a common thing though - we get that all the time.

Re: Slamming
 

As someone who was at one time the registered-keeper for a few thousand 'prime' domains, this sort of thing was all too common.

Another trick was to email the registered keeper a month or so before domain-renewal was due, 'reminding' you that it was time to renew - if you followed the conveniently-supplied link [to the scammer's site] and paid-up what you actually did was transfer the registrarship of the domain over to the slammer - who would then charge you stupid amounts for subsequent renewals, any DNS-changes and any future attempt to transfer the domain to a different registrar.

Search "Domain Registrar of America" or "DROA" for plentiful examples of this particular scam.

Re: Slamming
 

Yes Cossor is still a recognised brand within Raytheon.

I have forwarded or redirected many Emails about old Cossor equipment particulaly for Aerospace products such as Radar and IFF.

I have been in contact with several Raytheon staff most of whom were ex Cossor.
I dont know why they didn't choose to take up any of the available domain names, I guess because none of the new product ranges are branded as Cossor as far as I can tell its just legacy equipment.

It's funny we get a lot of Spam at work I guess this one is so well known amongst IT specialists it doesn't get past SPAM filters.

Indeed Email from friends and contacts ending in .cn is often blocked and I have to request exceptions. (Thank goodness for WeChat).

Cheers

Mike T

Re: Slamming
 

Yes I have had this one a few times and as in the case of the OP my first port of call was my Hosting site to check the status.

A quick search as you said brought up the DORA site reading some of the Scams on there who'd be a webmaster :censored:

Cheers

Mike T

Re: Slamming
 

I suspect Raytheon not picking up the cossor domain is mostly competence related. They did a transition to Lotus Notes and Raytheon.co.uk and probably just forgot to renew the old domain. I know the people who were involved in maintaining it and it was one of my motivations to leave in the end ;) Oh that and Six Sigma and the fact the place was a kafkaesque nightmare worthy of mention in Dilbert!

I imagine you get many interesting emails! Probably lots of mailing lists I forgot to remove my subscription for before I left :)