It looks like this old one is doing the rounds again at the moment.

You receive an email similar to the folowing:

"Dear President/CEO, [artBreak]

We are the department of registration service in China. we have something need to confirm with you.
We formally received an application on 26 June 2011, One company which self-styled "newcompany, Inc"are applying to register “yourdomain" as brand name and CN domain names as below:

yourdomain.asia
yourdomain.cn
yourdomain.com.cn
yourdomain.com.hk
yourdomain.com.tw
yourdomain.hk
yourdomain.net.cn
yourdomain.org.cn
yourdomain.tw
yourdomain.in

After our initial examination, we found that the brand name applied for registration are as same as your company’s name and trademark.
These days we are dealing with it, hope to get the affirmation from your company. If your company and this"newcompany, Inc"as the same company,there is no need reply to us,We will accept their application and will register those for them immediately.

 If your company has no relationships with that company nor do not authorized,please reply to us within 7 workdays,if we can't get any information from yours over 7 workdays,we will unconditionally approve the application submitted by "newcompany, Inc". 

Thanks for your cooperation.

Best Regards,"

I guess that to people that live on the net, this kind of scam is kind of obvious, and almost the norm now.

For the rest, I can see how this could cause concern and encourage people to part with extortionate amounts of money.  I actually followed this up a few years ago, and found that not only did the people sending the email want me to register all the mentioned domains, but they wanted me to at an over inflated rate.

As a general rule, if correspondence comes to you from a company / persons that you don't know, don't give it any weight and don't be scared to ask around.