Oh no, what can I possibly do?

I have just been informed that:

We are a professional internet consultant organization in Asia, we have a pretty important issue needing to confirm with your company. On Sep,8,2009, we received an application formally, one company named [company name] applied for the brand keyword “thepickards” and following domain names:

• thepickards.asia
• thepickards.cn
• thepickards.com.cn
• thepickards.com.hk
• thepickards.com.tw
• thepickards.hk
• thepickards.net.cn
• thepickards.tw

with our organization.

During our preliminary investigation, we found that these domain names’ keyword is identical with your trademark. I wonder whether you consigned [company name] to register these domain names with us? Or is [company name] your business partner or distributor in Asia?Unsolicited Email

Note that not only does the unsolicited email think that I am somehow going to be concerned by someone registering ‘thepickards’ domains in China (.cn), Taiwan (.tw) and Hong Kong (.hk), but they have gone to the trouble of addressing me (not by name of course) as the president and CEO of the company.

Well, that’s very nice of them, but this is really just another cut and paste job using my domain name and looking to see what other domain names in their registration area are available and then no doubt trying to get me into panicking to think that I simply must get them registered, where no doubt this company would offer me first dibs on the domain names for an appropriate remuneration.

It could be a complete scam: i.e. I could pay the money and get buggerall in return, or it could simply be a scare designed to drum up business. Either way, I see it as something at least a little underhand, and to be honest, I’m not actually desperate to ensure that any references to ‘thepickards’ is owned by me. And even if I was (and I’m not), I’d be more interested in stuff like thepickards.com, or thepickards.eu, or thepickards.net, rather than some obscure (to me) Chinese domains.

Of course, one of the minor clues that it’s not entirely a full-on legit query is the fact that it wasn’t addressed to me. It’s not exactly difficult to find out what my name is, if you have a poke around the website. There’s even a contact form people can use. If you don’t use either of these and your email to me looks (presumably with very good reason) like you’ve simply mailmerged my details into a standard letter that you’re spamming out to others, then I will tend to assume your email is spam.

And that’s before we start looking at minor details like the company name you provided appearing to be fictitious (they certainly don’t have a website and I can’t find any reference to them). For goodness sake, if you’re going to send me spam, at least do me the credit of realising that shit spam will be recognised as such easily.

…and dealt with accordingly.

But it’s all the rest of you that I wish to complain about. If spammers couldn’t make money out of doing this sort of thing; if people didn’t buy goods, services, or in this case domain names from unsolicited spam, then people wouldn’t do it. Those of you out there who do click on the links and buy the goods are encouraging the spammers to perpetuate the spam. You are therefore equally to blame. So stop it.

Message ends…