Scam involving foreign domain names.
If you receive an email with the subject Regarding" domainname "Dispute, this email is most likely a scam.
Scam Summary
You receive an email from some organization claiming to be verifying if someone is authorized to buy domain names similar to yours. If you respond to this email, you'll be told - in one way or another - that you need to purchase those domain names, the cost of which is extremely high. After purchasing the domains, you'll receive additional emails from different scam companies claiming the same thing with different domain names that are similar to yours.
Scam Example
This is an email received from one of these many scam companies.
From: Jeff Yang <jeff@tsnet-asia.com>
Date: February 16, 2012 8:58:53 PM CST
Subject: Regarding“ domainname ”Dispute
Reply-To: <jeff@tsnet-asia.com>
(If you are not in charge of this please transfer this email to your President or appropriate person, thanks)
Dear President,
We are the department of Asian Domain registration service in china, have something to confirm with you. We formally received an application on February 16, 2012. One company which self-styled "Busit Industrial Co., Ltd" were applying to register "domainname" as Network Brand and following domain names:
domainname.asia
domainname.cn
domainname.co.in
domainname.com.cn
domainname.com.tw
domainname.hk
domainname.in
domainname.net.cn
domainname.org.cn
domainname.tw
After our initial checking, we found the name were similar to your company's, so we need to check with you whether your company has authorized that company to register these names. If you authorized this, we will finish the registration at once. If you did not authorize, please let us know within 7 workdays, so that we will handle this issue better. Out of the time limit we will unconditionally finish the registration for "Busit Industrial Co., Ltd".
Best Regards,
Jeff Yang
Registration Dept.
Tel: +862885915586 || Fax: +862885912116
Address:8/F XiYu building No,52 JinDun Road,QingYang District,Chengdu City, China
P Please consider the environment before you print this e-mail.
Domain names this scam comes from.
The above example seems tied to tsnet-asia.com and tsnet-asia.org; unfortunately they have many domain names and it wouldn't be worth while to try to find them all, as they're most likely continuously getting new ones.
Other references of this scam
If you'd like to read more on this, here are a couple places I found that have good explanations as well.
http://www.firetrust.com/en/blog/chris/domain-name-scams
http://www.piotrkrzyzek.com/registration-proclamation-chinese-domain-scam/
http://trusted.md/feed/items/system/2008/01/29/asia_domain_name_registration_scam