Archive for the ‘WhoIs’ Category

Chinese Domain Name Registration Game

October 17, 2008

I received the following email today from a Chinese “entrepreneur”.

The email is a rather exaggerated attempt at selling Chinese domain name registrations via the 87Global.hk web site.

The email sender’s reply address @ “Registry-China.org” redirects to 87Global.hk – a domain which in turn was registered by “Wang Yugen”.

87Global.hk

87Global.hk

Both the above domains have been registered and online less than three months…

The domain “registrar” site does provide legitimate lists of Asian Pacific and European domains.

Asia Pacific Domains

Asia Pacific Domains

Asia Pacific Domain Extensions

European Domains

European Domains

European Domain Extensions

The site also has a form for registering the following extensions including .Com.Cn domains albeit – at unbelievably high prices.

The .Com.Cn domain is an interesting extension. I am not sure how it came about, but Google already finds about 524,000,000 pages with “com.cn” in them.

.com.cn

.com.cn

I am sure if I did some digging, I would find that both site’s have content that was either – in whole or in part – copied and pasted directly from known and reputable registrar sites.

What I am not sure of is whether anyone has ever registered a domain successfully through either one of the two domains mentioned above.

The aforementioned email:
_____________________________________________________________________________
(If you are NOT the CEO, please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent. Thanks.)

Dear CEO,

We are the department of registration service in China. we have something need to confirm with you. We formally received an application on October 17th, 2008, One company which self-styled “POI Soft, Inc.” are applying to register “marketingprinciples” as internet brand and CN domain names as below:

marketingprinciples.asia
marketingprinciples.cn
marketingprinciples.com.cn
marketingprinciples.com.tw
marketingprinciples.hk
marketingprinciples.in
marketingprinciples.net.cn
marketingprinciples.org.cn
marketingprinciples.tw

After our initial examination, we found that the internet brand applied for registration are as same as your company’s name and trademark. These days we are dealing with it. hope to get the affirmation from your company. If your company and this “POI Soft, Inc.” as the same company, there is no need reply to us, We will accept their application and will register those for them immediately.

If your company has no relationships with that company nor do not authorized, please reply to us within 7 workdays, if we can’t get any information from yours over 7 workdays,we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by “POI Soft, Inc.” .

Thanks for your cooperation.

Best Regards,
Xx Yy

____________________________________________________________________________

If you have an interest in registering your brand or brands in foreign markets and instead of risking domain registration with an unknown registrar, visit Internic to find an accredited registrar for the country and language you plan to register in.

Incidentally, none of the above Chinese “registrars” are listed on Internic’s page of accredited registrars.

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Google Who Is Domain Search

April 29, 2008

Google search now provides WhoIs domain registration information directly in their search results via Domain Tools.

Domain ownership details can be found by clicking the result.

A search for: whois domaintools.com produces the following result.

Google Who Is Domain Search

Be sure to to type whois as one word as opposed to two because a search for who is domaintools.com doesn’t produce the domain’s registration information, it produce the site’s search results.

Google Who Is Domain Search

I have used Domain Tools for several years and highly recommend their site and tools. As far as I can tell, there are few if any other domain intelligence tools that provide anywhere near the data Domain Tools does.

Jay Westerdal of Domain Tools blog posts about the domain industry are also worth investigating further.

InStealthMode.com

June 28, 2007

On numerous occasions I have typed in a domain only to be redirected to the site InStealthMode.com.

Today I found them after looking at my content placement report stats in my Google Adwords My Client Center account.

Of all the sites my ads appeared on yesterday, their Domain Ads had by far generated the largest number of impressions. However, Google doesn’t report “Domain Ads” at the domain level like each of the other content partners in my report. I can only assume Domain Ads is also http://www.domainads.com.

Based on the large number of impressions “Domains Ads” generated, they appear to control a large domain portfolio. This leads me to conclude they are a professional domainer.

The InStealthMode.com site promises to launch on July 7, 2007. (07-07-07)

Their WhoIs Record shows Centreville, VA based DreamSeller Inc. – In Stealth Mode as the registrant.

It would be helpful to advertisers for Google Adwords to parse out the domains within parked domain portfolios too when bundling reports of large quantities of impressions under one reseller like Domain Ads.

InStealthMode.com