About once a year I receive an email from a Chinese (Domain) Registry that claims to supposedly inquire for a company that is about to register the alphadev.cn, alphadev.com.cn, alphadev.net.cn and alphadev.org.cn domains.

It starts by setting a false urgency:

If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent. Thanks!

Then they ask whether I have any business with said entity:

But after checking it, we find this name conflict with your company name or trademark. In order to deal with this matter better, it’s necessary to send email to you and confirm whether your company have affiliation with this CN company or not?

If I don’t answer, another follow-up broadly repeating the initial message is sent.

But regardless of me responding, or whether I “permit” or “deny” the “company” to go through with the registration, a third email from a supposed representative of the registering company is sent that claims that they intend to register the domains in any case:

We are waiting for Mr. $name_of_registry_official approval and think these CN domains and internet keyword are very important for our business. Even though Mr. $name_of_registry_official advises us to change another name, we will persist in this name.

After that last message there is silence for about a year and neither of the domains are ever being registered.

I assume this is a high-pressure sales tactic to have people register .cn-TLDs. I haven’t checked their ToS and I don’t even know what registering a Chinese domain entails or costs.

But what I am certain about is that I don’t want to register these domains and should I ever “expand my business” to China, I’m sure I will be able to find a suitable domain myself, and so will you if you made your way here by searching for strings from such an email.