They noted that this conflicted with my own ".com" registration, and "offered" me the chance to purchase these domains before selling them to the trading company. Of course, the total cost to secure these domains is over $600 year. I informed them that our name is trademarked, to which they replied that it is "first come first served" in the Asia market.

Obviously, this stinks of a scam. I'm not going to pay them, mainly because:

1) We're not interested in buying the ".com.cn", etc. domains. We don't need them to sell our product.

2)Even if someone else buys them, they won't be useful. These domains won't get the clout from search engines we will (owing to us actually having a product and generating meaningful inbound links).

3) They can have the name, but without a product it'll be useless. And they won't have our product.

4) Its expensive, and not a necessary expense by any means, especially for a startup (atleast as far as I know).

5) Again, it stinks of a scam. We refuse to be "blackmailed".

I'm curious if any of you have had similar experiences or offers. It would be helpful to me, and I'm sure others, if someone with more experience in this area were able to chime in. Is this ever legit? Did your startup buy ALL related domains? At which point would you do this?

So far I own [our_domain].com, .net, .org, .us, and a few others... but where do you stop?

Thanks in advance for the input!