Dear CEO,

We are a domain name registration and dispute organization in Asia, which mainly deal with the global companies’ domain name registration and internet Intellectual property right protection in Asia. Currently, we have a pretty important issue needing to confirm with your company.
On January 6. 2010, we received an application formally. One company named “Citters International, Inc” wanted to applied for the network Keyword “brandscapesworldwide” and some domain names through our body.

Now we are handling with the registration of find that the keyword of these domain names and network keyword is identical with your company’s. So we have to confirm with you at two points:
1. If your company consign Citters company to register these domain names and network Keyword, we will send application form to them and help them finish the registration at once.
2. If your company have nothing to do with Citters company, they maybe have other purposes to register these domain names and network Keyword.

I want to confirm that are you the corporate representative of this company? If you do, I will feedback some problems to you; if you do not, please send my words to your company’s coprorate representative or lawyer. We need your answer of force adeffect. In order to deal with this issue better, please contact us by telephone or email as soon as possible.

Waiting for your reply ASAP.

Best Regards,
Karl

Auditing Department

At first I was afraid, I was petrified…. oh wait, that’s a song. But anyways, I tried going to APNS.hk (the domain listed as the website for this company) and they did not exist. I then Googled the company and found a wealth of similarly worded emails that have been largely considered a scam. Apparently what this company does is prowl the WHOIS database to find companies that have only registered a .com TLD and don’t have the other TLD’s, specifically the .cn and .hk ones. Then, they send this strongly worded and poorly grammatical email to the admin and tech contact listed in the WHOIS, spurring them into action. I suspect their eventual goal is to sell the .cn and .hk and possibly other domains at highly inflated prices to these hapless domain owners.
Not exactly a scam, or fraud, but kind of unpleasant anyway. Just posting this so that anyone else who encounters such an email in the future can take heed!