If you happen to own any domain names, you may one day be the lucky recipient of a message that begins something like:
I'm sorry to disturb you so abrupt. We are a domain name registration service company in Asia, On 25th October. we received a formal application submitted by Mr. John Zhang who wanted to use the keyword "blahblah" to register the Internet Brand and with suffix such as .cn /.com.cn /.net.cn /.hk /.asia / domain names. After our initial examination, we found that these domain names to be applied for registration are same as your domain name and trademark. ...
The message goes on to say that they 'have hold down his registration'
for the time being (because apparently they suspect that Mr Zhang may be a 'domain investor'
and see this as their duty as an 'authorized anti-cybersquatting organization'
). However, if they don't hear from you in five days, they're going to go ahead and give Mr Zhang what he wants.
This is a type of scam known as a 'domain dispute scam'. At its simplest, the scam is an attempt to get you to register one or more domains. The sender is usually not a registrar and there is certainly no Mr Zhang (a message from another domain dispute scammer once warned me that a mythical investment corporation was about to register a domain which, on inspection, turned out to be have already been registered for a year). However, it's easy to guess that if you do go ahead and register the domains — at an inflated price, no doubt — then Mr Zhang won't give up so easily. Other charges — legal fees, administration costs etc. — will quickly follow as the imaginary Mr Zhang fights you for possession of a domain you didn't want in the first place.
A quick search revealed that the scammer uses a variety of different names. The message that I received, for example, listed contact information at ntchinanet.com, but other users report identical messages from ntchinadns.com. To make the scam seem more convincing, the scammer has created websites for each of their scam domains: the sites are actually clones of the website of a presumably legitimate hosting provider, and the scammer has simply edited some of the graphics on the site to add their 'brand' and contact details. Their choice of domain names appears to have been dictated by the site they've cloned, whose banner begins with the letters 'NTC': the scam sites actually preserve those initial letters followed by a space, so on first reading the name of the company shown in the banner graphic looks like 'NTC HinaDNS'. We can presumably expect more 'ntchina-' domains to show up in future scams.
If you get one of these messages, you can safely ignore it. Mr Zhang will not be registering 'your' domains any time soon.