One of the domain world’s most notorious criminals, John Zuccarini, was busted again for typosquatting. Instead of forwarding traffic to porno like he did last time, Zuccarini was sending visitors to websites containing legitimate products. Zuccarini’s typosquatting violated the law, and he was surprisingly caught again. According to MarkMonitor CMO, Frederick Felman, “He must not be a very smart criminal.” An expert from the article:
A so-called typosquatter who served pornographic advertisements on domains such as Bobthebiulder.com and teltubbies.com has been fined again by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
John Zuccarini has agreed to give up US$164,000 in typosquatting revenue he is alleged to have raked in, the FTC said Tuesday in a statement. Five years ago, a federal court had barred Zuccarini from registering domains that are misspellings of legitimate brands, a practice called typosquatting, but he ignored the order, according to Carolyn Hann, a staff attorney with the FTC.
“He was engaging in practices that violated certain provisions of the order,” Hann said. “He had certain domain names that were transpositions or misspellings of popular domain names.” — Source: PC World
It’s this sort of stuff that establishes the general public’s definition about the domain industry.
As we all know, the scandalous stories get the press but I’ve already had to work on a lot of friends and family deprogramming them of their preconcieved notions about this business.