What exactly is CyberSquatting?
CyberSquatting is when unscrupulous individuals make exorbitant amounts of money by selling domain names containing trademarks of well known companies.
Usually the CyberSquatter will register a domain containing part of or the whole trademark of the victim company and then writes slanderous comments and content about the company or their products and services.
People visiting the CyberSquatter’s website, would then associate the content of the website with the company being victimized in the scam.
Companies falling victim to CyberSquatting scams are then forced to pay exorbitant amounts of money to buy the domain from the CyberSquatter in order to protect their goodwill.
TypoSquatting is a form of CyberSquatting, where the fraudsters rely on misspellings of the original URL and redirect the websurfer to their website.
The websurfer often doesn’t realize that they have been redirected to the CyberSquatter’s website, where the CyberSquatter would then bring the victim company’s brand into disrepute.
Laws and regulation have been formulated to prevent this sort of extortion from occurring and to protect domain name intellectual property rights.
On the other side of the coin, CyberSquatting can be a skilful way to generate traffic to your site. Most domains have common misspellings of there URL, thus most popular and corporate domains buy all or most of the common misspellings of their domain name.
This redirects them to the correct landing page. Using a misspelt domain of a popular domain is a skilful way to generate traffic your site, while making sure that your misspelt domain disclaimer disassociates itself from the original domain, to avoid branding issues.
[wrc_post_widget id=’385′]
