Providing Lesotho's Children with Keys to the World

This is the story of our efforts to end the vicious cycle of poverty, disease, inadequate education, and early death
in a remote rural community in Lesotho, Africa, by providing quality education and life skills
to the young children there. Join us on our journey ...

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Beware of Others Using the Laptops to Lesotho Name

If you see a "laptopstolesotho" URL in some form other than www.laptopstolesotho.org, it is not in anyway associated with our organization, Laptops to Lesotho Inc.

I believe a Chinese network registry company , in conjunction with an individual or business there, is trying to coerce Laptops to Lesotho into paying for the rights to the "laptopstolesotho" domain names and internet keyword in China.

In emails from the network registry company, it's company name was not specified, which made me suspicious from the start.  The company's URL is www . cnwebregistry . net and Jim Gong lists himself as their general manager, though he signed the email only as "Jim".  

Mr. Gong said the business that wants to use our name is called Huayu Ltd.  However, in correspondence with the supposed representative of this company, Jiang Zhihai, neither his title nor the company's name was stated.

Via Mr. Gong, I asked Huayu Ltd. to respect our name and give us the courtesy of finding a different name to use, but Jiang Zhihai refused. 

Unless we pay for the domain names ourselves, we have no legal standing to dispute anyone using our name.  As we have very limited financial resources, we cannot afford to bend to extortion which would divert resources from our valuable humanitarian work. 

While I do not have specific proof that these companies are engaged in actual extortion or a scam, an internet search brings up their names in relation to attempts to coerce others to pay for domain name and internet keyword rights in exactly the same way.  Please feel free to email complaints  about their unethical practices as many times as you like to "Jiang Zhihai" jiang_zhihai088@vip.sina.com and "Jim" jim.gong@cnwebregistry.net.

Janissa