In China, people who own domain names are considered very smart, but this is not always true. Suppose you registered a domain name a year ago. One day someone who claims to be the sales director of a domain brokerage firm calls you. He says that you have a very good domain name and he wants to sell it for you. He appraises the domain name to be worth about 1m CNY if it comes with certain domain certificates.
The next day, an executive from an investment company calls and says he wants to buy your domain name. Quite magically, his offer is about 1m CNY too. But, the condition is that you provide him with the relevant domain certificates.
While you are still congratulating yourself on how smart you were in registering the domain name, a domain owner contacts you and tells you to give up your domain name by selling it to him. He has the same name on a different extension and his domain name is stronger than yours because it already comes with all the relevant certificates.
By now, what would you be thinking? Of course, the only thing that needs to be done is to get the relevant certificates. So, as quickly as you can, you get back to the broker and send him thousands of dollars for the domain certificates — only to realize later that they are all fake. No certificate is ever required to sell a domain name!
It’s interesting to see that Chinese investors get the same type of appraisal scam emails. Especially since China is one of the regions that those type of scams have been found to originate from. I guess it just goes to show that nobody is immune or excluded from being targeted.
If it is too good to be true, then very likely it’s too good to be true. Caveat emptor!
Something similar happen to me… I had a domain name and someone contacted me about a possible purchase. The person said he was a domain broker and had an interested buyer who had my domain at the top of his purchase list. This person then said, his buyer is willing to pay 20,000 USD. Which was actually the estibot.com value of the domain, plus 2,000. However, he would need me to pay for a certification of the value via an appraisal site which he gave me the link for… I quickly realized the offer was to good to be true and that this was a scam to get 99 bucks for a fake appraisal. Pretty sad stuff…
Good that you quickly realized it’s a scam. Isn’t it similar to the Nigerian scam where you are asked to pay first in order to get the bigger prize.