Dear Manager

I run a personal website. One person. No employees. No CEO. No shareholders. No board of directors convening quarterly to discuss Q3 synergies. Just me, a Mac mini, and an unreasonable number of self-hosted services humming away on a Dell Inspiron in my bedroom like a very mundane hearth fire I refuse to let go out.

So you can imagine my confusion when I received a very urgent email – urgent, they stressed – addressed to my “Manager or CEO.”

It is, for context, nearly two in the morning. I am, for further context, somewhat drunk. And yet I find myself compelled to write about this, which tells you something about the quality of the email.

The Email

I’ll spare you the sender’s personal details, because unlike them, I have a vague sense of professional decorum. But the gist went something like this:

Dear Manager,

(If you are not the person who in charge of this, please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent. Thanks)

We are a Network Service Company which is the domain name registration center in Shanghai, China.

We received an application from [A Company] requesting “ewancroft” as their internet keyword and China (CN) domain names (ewancroft.cn / ewancroft.com.cn / ewancroft.net.cn / ewancroft.org.cn).

After checking it, we find this name conflict with your company name or trademark. In order to deal with this matter better, it’s necessary to send an email to you and confirm whether this chinese company is your distributor or not?

It was signed off by a “Senior Manager” at what I can only describe as a Network Service Company, complete with a Shanghai address, a telephone number, a fax number – a fax number, in 2026 – and a mobile.

And at the very bottom, the crowning jewel:

Tip: Please add mail sender account to your contacts to make sure our response does not end up in your spam folder.

Remarkable. Genuinely remarkable.

Let’s Talk About What’s Actually Happening Here

This is a well-documented scam. It has been running for the better part of two decades, and it works like this:

There is no Shunkai Holdings Ltd clamouring for ewancroft.org.cn. There is no trademark conflict. There is no urgency. There is only a boiler room somewhere generating cold emails and hoping a sufficient percentage of recipients don’t know how domain registration actually works.

I would also like to state, for the record, that I have zero connection to China. None. I am a single person of Scottish and English heritage living in England, running a personal website and some open source projects. The email asks whether the applicant is my “distributor.” My distributor. What would I be distributing? npm packages? My slightly unhinged blog posts? I do not have a distribution network. I do not have a network of any kind. I have a server in my bedroom and a Cloudflare tunnel. That’s it. That’s the whole operation.

The “internet keyword” framing is a particular favourite of mine. That’s not a thing. That is not a legal or technical concept that exists in any meaningful sense. They might as well have said they were applying for my ainm – my name, my soul-word, the thing the ancient Celts believed carried your very essence and could be used against you if an enemy learned it. At least that would have a certain mythological coherence. “Internet keyword” has none.

The Technical Absurdity

Here’s what a legitimate registrar contact actually looks like: it goes to Nominet, the authority for .uk domains, or to the registrar the domain is registered through. You know, the entities with actual standing to act on domain disputes. Not the end user. Not a random email address scraped off a personal website.

I know this because I have a Level 3 diploma in Information Technology. Year 1. Not a degree. Not a decade of industry experience. A single year of a college qualification, and I still know more about how domain disputes work than the self-described domain name registration center in Shanghai, China.

If there were a genuine dispute over ewancroft.uk – which, again, there isn’t, because I am a single human being and not a multinational with Chinese distributors – the correct process involves ICANN dispute resolution policies, the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy, and actual legal mechanisms. Not a cold email with a parenthetical guilt trip.

The company name itself contained “cnregistrar.” The domain registration company’s name contained the word registrar. They are a company that registers domains. Their branding is literally just a description of what they do, combined with a country code. This is the organisation claiming to have expertise in your brand protection.

The Email Was Plain Text

I want to dwell on this for a moment.

A Network Service Company. A domain registration center. A business whose entire value proposition is that they understand the internet well enough to manage your online presence for you.

They sent a plain text email.

No HTML. No logo. No letterhead. No banner image of the Shanghai skyline. No tags held together with cellpadding="0" and prayer, as is traditional. Just raw, unformatted ASCII dumped into an email client like it was 1994 and they were posting to a mailing list about Linux kernel patches.

The fax number suggests a certain vintage, admittedly. But even so. If your pitch is “trust us with your internet domains,” maybe demonstrate awareness that HTML email exists. That’s a low bar. That bar is on the floor. They went under it.

The “Urgent” Forward Request

The parenthetical at the top – (If you are not the person who in charge of this, please forward this to your CEO, because this is urgent. Thanks) – is doing a lot of work.

It’s designed to trigger two things: first, the assumption that this is a business, with a hierarchy, and someone in that hierarchy should be dealing with it. Second, urgency. Get it to the right person fast, before the deadline, before Shunkai Holdings Ltd secures your “internet keyword.”

The problem is that I am the CEO. I am also the CTO, the CFO, the Head of Marketing, the Head of Infrastructure, the sole developer, the one-person support team, and the guy who has to remember to renew the domain. The org chart is just a picture of my face.

If I forwarded this to my CEO, I would be forwarding it to myself. Which I suppose I did, in a sense, when I moved it to the folder I have set up specifically for this category of email.

Why They Got My Email

My public email address exists because I do open source work and I want people to be able to contact me. It’s on my website. It’s on my GitHub profile. It floats around the internet in various places, doing its job.

This is clearly how they found it – wherever it is, it’s floating around, doing its job. No research. No actual knowledge of what ewancroft.uk is or who runs it. Just a scraper, a list, and a mail merge.

If they had spent thirty seconds on my website, they would have found: a personal blog, a list of side projects, and no indication whatsoever of a corporate structure with a CEO to whom urgent domain conflicts should be escalated. But that would require thirty seconds of effort, which is not how boiler room economics work.

In Conclusion

If you receive one of these, delete it. Or file it. Or, if you are feeling generous, write a blog post about it.

There is no conflict. There is no applicant. There is no urgency. There is only a fax number and a man who calls himself a Senior Manager of a company whose name is literally just a description of what they do.

ewancroft.cn is available, for what it’s worth. If I were going to register anything, it would be ewancroft.scot – because ewancroft is my name, it is part Scottish by blood and by heritage, and if anyone has a claim to it it is me and the ancestors who presumably thought it up in a field somewhere north of the border. I would do that myself, through a registrar that knows what HTML is.

Dear Manager, indeed.