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
Cheers
Mike T
Cheers
Mike T