You've GOT to be kidding!

One of our customers forwarded this email to me. --begin email Dear President&CEO, We are an organization specified at dealing with domain name dispute and registration in Asia. We have something important on intellectual property right need to confirm with your company. On August 7, 2010, we received an application formally, one company named "Tasora Holding Ltd" applied for the Brand keyword "acme company" and some domain names with our organization.

After checking, we found your company is the original trademark owner. If the company's action haven't been authorized by your company, so their behavior will conflict with your interests. In order to deal with the matter better, please contact us ASAP. In addition, we hereby affirm that our time limit is 7 workdays. if your company files no reply within the time limit, we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by "Tasora Holding Ltd". Best Regards, Mr. Yadayada (name has been changed to protect this person who probably doesn't exist anyway.) --end quote Your first clue that it's a scam? Read it. Although we all make typos and our emails are often riddled with grammatical errors, (I'm guilty as charged) any legitimate company could hire someone to at least do a cursory read-through before sending a message that makes no sense. Secondly, if you manage your own domain name(s), then you should have VERY NECESSARY information about each name(s) that you own. You should know - where they are registered and the web address of the registrar (like www.BeeLineDomains.com) - the user name and password to the log in to the website where they're registered - when they were originally purchased - and most importantly, when they expire or come up for renewal If you don't know this information, then you may have it stuffed into a file. If you don't know which file it's stuffed in, then go through your files right now and get all the info you need. Test the login to be sure it works. Check the expiration date to be sure it's not expiring soon. If your domain name expires, your site goes offline! And, in many cases, your email goes with it. Yipes. Every day we become more dependent upon our email and website to conduct business. If you don't manage your name, then you've probably opted to use BeeLine's domain management services, which is smart. This means that you hit "forward" on any of these types of weird emails and forget about it, while letting us decide whether it's real or not. The customer who received this scammy email has a couple of successful businesses where he works every day. He knows that during the time when he's sitting at his desk messing around with domain name worries, he's not being productive at his own business. So, he trusts us to manage website woes for him. BeeLine handles domain name issues for lots of companies, whether or not we build or host their sites. Are you on shaky ground when it comes to your company's domain names? Just want to make sure your domain is healthy? Let us help you untangle domain name issues. 262.767.8887

~ Barb Emerson,  BeeLine Design - www.BeeLineDesign.com