An old scam is rearing its ugly head again, Protect Your Brand, another company is looking to trademark your company name, don’t dismiss this one as “it’ll never happen to me”, as it can come across as very legitimate and quite scary.

I have seen it in a number of different forms, as an email, a letter or a phone call, the latter is particularly underhanded, the caller, let’s call him Fred, gives a story that they have been contacted by an individual who wishes to buy virtually all the domain names that you don’t own, but which have your domain name in them, e.g. Specnet.com, Specnet.net, Specnet.me, Specnet.co etc, but Fred really doesn’t want to sell to this other guy as he was very rude, and when Fred asked him what he planned to do with these domain names he told him to “mind his own business”!

Fred would much prefer to sell them to you, but if you don’t buy them all he’ll have no choice but to sell them to the other guy. Of course there’ll be a time limit on this too, so you’ve got to make a quick decision. My advice is to ignore the email or letter completely otherwise you risk being bombarded, if it’s a phone call then request a written list of the domain names via email, this not only gives you breathing space but also the domain name of the company calling you. Check out their website – the one I looked at a while back had a professional home page, but all the other pages where terrible, so have a good look. Search for the company and see if anyone else has had any experience of these people, also double check the list of domain names and see if they are all actually available, the last one I saw 1 of the domain names was already owned by the recipient company.

The bottom line is that most people will find your website via a search engine, so as long as you have decent search engine marketing in place you don’t need the very best domain name in the world anyway and you can’t possibly own ALL of them.

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