There are plenty of domain professionals from China that are honest, up front and willing to engage in domain transactions with Westerners. They speak adequate English, and at any rate, better than my Mandarin.
Whether you sell to the Chinese, or buy domains from them, you’re bound to come across some shady characters.
I sold domains to Chinese domain investors years before the current craze for short domains formulated. During the past 18 months, I’ve also been bugged non-stop by spammers that send random offers for domains in my portfolio.
Spamming the owners of short domains is related to the relatively smaller number of permutations; for example, there are “only” 456976 LLLL .com domains (26^4), and if one were to only include the so-called “Chinese premium” letters, the number drops to 160,000 (20^4.)
It’s easy to generate a list of emails skimmed from WHOIS records; there is already one such stale list making the rounds among spammers.
One of these spamming folks did not just stop at sending me the usual robo-spam email, he followed up by submitting increasingly higher offers via Domain Name Sales.
I proceeded with accepting the offer and sent it to Escrow.com, aware of this person’s intentions.
The Escrow.com transaction timed out after 10 days, and I will now release all information related to this person, for failing to honor their offer which I accepted:
Email used: 76838155@qq.com
IP connected: 113.205.228.149
Amount involved: $2,000 USD
Related spam email:
Hi, Do you have a plan to sell your domain name [redacted]?
If you can, please tell me your price.
I will consider seriously.
Best Regards,
Jim
During NamesCon 2016 in Las Vegas, I was told that front-running is the main reason there are so many incomplete sales to inquiries that arrive from China: The offers only complete after the buyer resells the domain to someone else among the Chinese domain investors.
If you have a similar negative experience with Chinese domain investors, do share it in the comments below.
Chinese, American, German, whatever . . .
Not all (insert your favorite nationality) domain investors are worth dealing with either.
Adam – No doubt. There are e.g. some very flaky Swiss domain investors: http://acro.net/blog/one-out-of-three-swiss-domainers-is-a-stellar-guy/
But at least, they don’t spam the hell out of my inbox. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing, the Chinese domainers aren’t trained enough to the sensitivities of Westerners.
On top of that, anyone who follows spamming with a bogus offer, is a crook in my book, hence this post.