THE CHINESE DOMAIN SCAM AND OUR REACTIONS AT FOSSNAIJA.

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Last month (May 8 to be precise) we got a very interesting email from one Albert Liu ([email protected]) which was in retrospect with the intention to scare us into purchasing unwanted domains from him and possibly other scam trick he’s got up in his sleeves. Claiming to be a staff of the Chinese domain name registration, he wrote that a company, Hongbo Ltd, was trying to register the .cn, .com.cn, .net.cn, .org.cn versions of our website.

He posited that for us to stop or block that move we have to register the four domains with them.

Here is the email (May 8, 2020):

Hmm? Alright.

Without any hint of suspicion, we then replied:

Surprisingly, ten days later (May 18, 2020), we got another related to the issue but this time from a different strange fellow named Zhifa Ning ([email protected]):

Then the whole situation got “scammy”.

• Errors in grammar, spellings and punctuation.
• If you are trying to register the said domains, why would you be contacting fossnaija directly about it?
• If you want to promote your business in china (as claimed), how does it relate to Nigeria? Or they didn’t know that the “naija” in “fossnaija” stands for “Nigeria”?
• What business is Hongbo Ltd into, that it needs a Nigeria keyword to rank in china?

Strike back…

Then it was time to return the threat:

But Albert Liu was still persistent (May 20, 2020).

Still with the same style and poor grammar and spellings.

The game was on! Lets play and see who gets tired first.

Albert got similar reply that Zhifa got:

That was the last we heard from them.

Doing some googling, it was found that it’s a common scam technique used to try to extort cash from website owners.

So we had to post this here to help other website owners who might find themselves in similar circumstances. DO NOT PANICK, IT’S A SCAM. JUST DELETE THE FIRST EMAIL.

Happy Linux’NG!

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