03/12/2008

Allison Cote received this email and forwarded it to me. She was concerned about our website. It appears that someone is cyber-squatting, and we need to act quickly to prevent loss of our domain in China. I looked closely at the message trying to figure out what they want from us and how they will profit from it, and it looks like they are trying to get me to register domains or pay a transfer registration fee. We got almost the identical email to some of our other test domains, too, all purporting to be looking out for our "Intellectual Property" interests. My guess is that they are looking out for their own interests, namely getting $300 USD for each domain to transfer it to us. I am sure some companies spend the few thousand dollars just to be sure that they are protected, but that is giving in to a cheap scam.

Some of my clues? Misspelling Property as "propety". Also, the non-personalization (TO CEO). My guess is they harvested info from internet directories and sent millions of these emails to as many people as they could find on a website, perhaps cross referencing email addresses from the same domain. Allison Cote is in charge of Lotus Domino customer sales and support for SpamSentinel. She is listed on the website, http://www.maysoft.com but she is not listed as a Technical contact or any type of website contact.

This message falls under the category of scare tactic scam, which is designed to get you to act fast, preferably very fast. It certainly did get us to spend a few minutes looking at it. A good trick to remember is to type a few of the words from the email into Google. Generally, someone else has commented on the message, or at least you can get some other opinions about its veracity before acting hastily.

Unfortunately, we now look at all of these emails as bogus unless we can prove they are real. If we actually do have a problem, we will probably just ignore it....


Spam Scam Email below: