Status: Typosquatter
My wife just discovered this. If you misspell museumofhoaxes.com by switching he 'e' and the 'u' in museum (a very easy mistake to make), you'll arrive at
The Musuem of Hoaxes, which contains links to info about museums. It's obviously a site created by a spammer hoping to profit off of people who are trying to get to the Museum of Hoaxes, but who aren't great spellers. I probably shouldn't link to this alternative version of the Museum (I'm only sending more traffic to the spammer), but I'm kind of flattered that someone thought it was worth their time to create this.
According to Larry Adams, author of
Fraud In Other Words, this kind of practice (registering misspelled domain names) is called typosquatting:
Typosquatting is the intentional use of misspelled domain names and meta tags to misdirect Internet traffic or revenue from one Web site to another. It is based on the probability that a certain number of Internet users will mistype the URL or name of a Web site. Typically, a typosquatter registers several possible input errors for a Web site of a famous company, brand name or celebrity known for its high traffic. The typosquatter monitors the bogus sites to see how many clicks a day each of their "typo" domain names receives, and uses the information to sell advertising for the sites that receive a high volume of accidental traffic. Advertising revenue might come from selling ads to the original site's competitors or by providing redirect pages to gambling and porn sites.
Comments
I think these spammers get lists of new domains and open similar ones.
My own domain got very few hits in the year it existed for, and there was at least 1 spam version of that that I knew about.
Also our business website has a couple of spam alternatives.
You can always check Alexa.com to see how popular you are 😊
But at least I know the typosquatter didn't find my site via a list of new domain names. Here's the registration info I could find for musuemofhoaxes.com:
Created: 2005-08-26
Updated: 2005-09-28
Expires: 2006-08-26
Whereas I think I first registered museumofhoaxes.com back in 2000.
There is a butterfly conservatory here that has a similar problem, except it's not a case of a typo, it's a .com versus .ca (canada) issue. The conservatory uses .com, even though it's a Canadian site, but someone registered the .ca one with the same name. Subsequently, Canadians looking for info on the conservatory innocently assume it ends in .ca and instead find themselves on a site promoting "the butterfly man" who doesn't appear to be affiliated with the conservatory even though he lives in the same town. He also claims to own the trademark to their name, and has done some exhibits in a competitor to the conservatory.
I wonder who really owns the name, haven't heard anything about any kind of lawsuit.
Of course, the worst part is that when the domain name expires, those groups that snatch up expired domaine names will be waiting... It may well be a porn site in a few months.
http://www.arbforum.com/domains/UDRP/index.asp
-Kim