Advice: e-mail from Chinese registrar about domains

[cheeze69]

Hi all!

Today, I got this e-mail to one of my domains (edited with cheeze69 instead of real info ):
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Dear cheeze69:

We are Shanghai Chooke Network Information Technology Co., Ltd, which is the domain name register center in China.I have something need to confirm with you.

We have received an application formally,one company named "Shengteng (China) Investment Co.,Ltd" applies for the domain names(www.cheeze69.com.cn www.cheeze69.cn etc.) ,and the Internet keyword(cheeze69) on the internet April 09, 2009. We need to know the opinion of your company because the domain names and keyword may relate to the copyright of brand name on internet.

we would like to get the affirmation of your company,please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.
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Do you think this is legit or is this a way to try to get me to pay for domain registrations in China? The domain in question is my personal blog, which has been established for a few years and I make a bit of text-link-ad/adsense money from, but it's not really a "business" -- just my own brand if you can call it that.

Any advice on what's going-on? It seems odd to me that a registrar would take the time to research reserved/existing words online, but who knows.

Thanks!

[davezan]

It's a potential scam to safely ignore. Search around and you'll find variations
of it all around.

[danielgb123]

Just ignore it, looks like any other spam, scam email I have seen about domain registers.

[cheeze69]

Thanks for the input!

[edd666666]

Yes, scam that is becoming very common now, with about 4 variations of what you received.

[cheeze69]

Yeah, I did some searches on the exact first few words and found some good pages. One showed them wanting $20K to register several domains for 20 year. lol!

I'll delete the message - thanks for the input everyone and sorry to post about such a n00bish thing - I just didn't do my research

[derekwong28]

I don't think it is scam because I have received one of these in the past. I did communicate with them and they just wanted to know whether I had a trademark on my domain. I told them that I did not and they thanked me for telling them and left it at that. At no point did they ask for any money.

I think they just wanted to check whether their customer could run into trademark problems.

[primeelite]

You could always use the money you got from the Nigerian bank to pay for these domains.