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You know you’ve arrived when…

by | Jul 16, 2022 | Office Space | 5 comments

Most scammers are not exactly known for subtlety when sending out their fairly naked attempts to get you to fork over your hard-earned money to them. The most hilarious ones always involve some Nigerian who apparently stopped studying English at about the 5th Grade level and wants you to send over a bunch of account details so that he can deposit an obscene amount of money to you from some oddball discovery or windfall profit of some kind.

Those scams are funny, because they are so transparently ridiculous. And the Nigerians aren’t the only ones involved in such things. Of late, the Arabs and Indians have gotten involved too, and their barely comprehensible emails are great fun to observe.

But then the Chinese decided to weigh in and get a piece of the action with the “China Registry Scam“, which is impressive in terms of its relative sophistication and its sheer brazenness, not to mention its longevity. It has been happening since at least 2010, and continues to get more elaborate and silly by the year.

So imagine my surprise, and then amusement, when I saw an email like this pop up across multiple websites that I own (yes, I actually have more than one):

If you respond to them, telling them to eff off, you’ll get a follow-up email that looks something like this:

To whom it concerns,

We will register the China domain names “[your domain].cn” “[your domain].com.cn” “[your domain].net.cn” “[your domain].org.cn” and internet keyword “[your domain]” and have submitted our application. We are waiting for Mr. [Corporate Flack]’s approval. These CN domains and internet keyword are very important for us to promote our business in China. Although Mr. [Corporate Flack] advised us to change another name, we will persist in this name.

Kind regards

[Random Asshat]

Regardless of whether you tell them to eff off or not, the Corporate Flack bot will then send you a follow-up email asking for money:

Dear [You],

Based on your company having no relationship with them, we have already suggested that they should choose another name to avoid this conflict, but they persist in this name as China domain names ([your domain].cn, [your domain].com.cn, [your domain].net.cn, [your domain].org.cn) and internet keyword. In our opinion, maybe they do the similar business as your company then register it to promote their company.

As is known to all, the domain name registration based on the international principle is opened to company and individual. Any company or individual have the right to register any domain name and internet keyword which are unregistered. Your company haven’t registered this name as China domain names and internet keyword, so any company is able to obtain them by registration. But in order to avoid this conflict, the trademark or original name owner have priority right to register China domain name and internet keyword during our dispute period. If your company is the original owner of this name and want to register these China domain names ([your domain].cn, [your domain].com.cn, [your domain].net.cn, [your domain].org.cn) and internet keyword to prevent anybody from using them, please inform us. We can send you an application form with price list to help your company register these China domain names and internet keyword during our dispute period if you want to register them.

Best Regards

[Corporate Flack]

I’m severely tempted to follow up with these characters and ask them exactly what kind of price list they plan on using to try to gouge me, just for shits and giggles.

There is, however, a serious point to be made out of all of this, which is that, when doing business with the Chinese, you’d damned well better count your fingers right after the handshake.

From what I have seen, the Chinese are a low-trust, high-performance, very insular culture that will absolutely not hesitate to screw you over if it works to their advantage. If you are not one of them, then you are simply someone that they can deal with on their own terms, and be exploited if they don’t like you.

That is not to say that the Chinese, in and of themselves, are bad people. Far from it. In my experience, Chinese people can be very pleasant to interact with, and are very hard-working, capable, no-nonsense types who just want to do a good job and be rewarded for it.

However, their attitudes toward things like “letter of the law” and “playing by the rules” is… elastic, to put it as charitably as possible. That comes directly from their culture, and especially from the ravages that this same culture has endured for the past 70 years under Communist rule. Whatever sense of a “rules-based order” that they might have had once upon a time, has gone straight out the window from living under a system where the rules are whatever the ruling authorities say they are, and which change on a dime.

This, incidentally, is why historians will look back after the complete collapse of the Pax Americana with wonder and horror at how quickly the USA transformed into the Empire of Lies, and destroyed itself by creating its own made-up rules that it violated repeatedly. For, as bad as life under the USSA is, can we be under any illusions that life under Chinese hegemony would be better?

It will not be. The Chinese are far more nationalistic, xenophobic, imperialistic, and self-centred than Americans ever were.

Actually, that is their great source of strength – they cannot be intimidated by being called racist. Indeed, if you ever call a Chinaman racist to his face, he will not react the way that a White Westerner will. Instead of horror and contrition and grovelling debasement, you will get annoyance or amusement, combined with a complete lack of respect for you and your opinion.

So, eventually, I think we are going to see a lot more such scams emerge from China – except, by that point, they won’t be scams, they will be actual threats, with teeth. And Westerners will have only themselves to blame for letting things get to that point.

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5 Comments

  1. jack

    “For, as bad as life under the USSA is, can we be under any illusions that life under Chinese hegemony would be better?”

    Yes, the Chinese didn`t invent the fake Vaxx and try to make everyone take it. Then there is Libya, Syria etc. It gets tiring hearing Americans claim the Chinese would be worse when their history in comparison shows they could not be.

    Reply
    • Didact

      Yes, the Chinese didn`t invent the fake Vaxx and try to make everyone take it

      They did invent their own not-vaxx – two of them, actually – both of which turned out to be even less effective than the US and UK not-vaxxes, and then forced them on their own people through workplace mandates. The population supposedly rebelled against an outright actual vaccine passport plan, yet local officials and governments blacklisted people who didn’t have the Sinovac and Sinopharm clot-shots throughout 2021.

      And that’s before we get to the insanely draconian lockdowns that the Chinese imposed on their own people, trapping tens of thousands inside an exhibition centre because of ONE positive Coof test, welding people into their own houses, smashing in the heads of pets on the street, etc.

      Then there is Libya, Syria etc.

      Tell that to the Africans now infuriated by being colonised by the Chinese. They are every bit as bad as the British and French before them, in the eyes of those Blacks.

      It is true that the Chinese have not generally intervened militarily in another country since, basically, 1979 in Vietnam – when they got their butts handed to them. It is also true that the Chinese are more than capable of using debt-trap diplomacy to ensnare other countries in exactly the same way that the Americans and Europeans did it, only much more quickly and effectively.

      I do not believe that the Chinese will be as militaristic and interventionist as the USA has been. They will exercise their hegemony, for the little time that they have it, in rather more insidious ways, through economic, financial, and technological leverage.

      Reply
    • imnobody00

      I live in a country that is slowing passing from American hegemony to Chinese hegemony.

      Things that American want: money, business, eternal debt that makes global bankers richer and richer, austerity that makes the country and its citizens poorer, abortion, feminism, lgbt, lots of leftists NGOs and UN agencies, immigration, diluting the national character, removing traditions and religion, protecting the criminals with human rights while good citizens live in fear, making the government dependent from global organizations, protecting the foreigner before the citizen… etc etc

      What Chinese people want: money and international power. Anything that you do inside your borders is your business.

      Give me the scammers Chinese every time. By the way, when I lived in Houston for one year, everybody was trying to scam me for an easy buck. But the biggest scam in the world is “American help”

      Give n

      Reply
  2. jack

    A question, which country is know around the world for saying “I will destroy your country if you don´t take my debt as payment for what ever you have that I want”.

    Reply
  3. furor kek tonicus ( i demand that Joe Biden disavow his treasonous endorsement of "Let's go Brandon" )

    Didact
    “Whatever sense of a “rules-based order” that they might have had once upon a time, has gone straight out the window from living under a system where the rules are whatever the ruling authorities say they are, and which change on a dime.”
    .
    a lot longer than that. look up “point deer, make horse”. it’s got a history almost 2000 years old in Chinese culture.
    .
    https://spandrell.com/2015/06/03/the-purpose-of-absurdity/
    .
    you also ought to look up some of the Chinese genocides from back in the day. during a famine, it wasn’t particularly unusual for an emperor to wipe out an entire village, seize all of their assets and give whatever food and cattle they had to the neighboring village.
    .
    kinda helps ameliorate the hunger problem in both towns … and the surviving town has no questions about what will happen to them if they start to become “problematic”.
    .
    Bloody Shovel likely popularized this as both JC Wright and The Federalist did not cover this until December of 2015.
    .
    https://www.scifiwright.com/2015/12/point-deer-make-horse/

    Reply

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