Yesterday, FoxNews reported that QuinStreet has agreed to hand over GIBill.com and its website to the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Twenty US states were involved in the settlement, and QuinStreet would also have to pay $2.5 million to those states as part of the settlement. QuinStreet is a publicly traded company on NASDAQ, trading under they symbol QNST.
According to the FoxNews article, the settlement is related to this:
“The states alleged that QuinStreet violated consumer protection laws while operating websites that generate leads primarily for the for-profit education industry. The states said that several of the company’s sites, including GIBill.com, deceptively gave the appearance that the sites were operated, owned or endorsed by the U.S. government or military.
QuinStreet will relinquish ownership and control of GIBill.com to the veterans affairs department that will use the domain to promote the program and its available benefits.“
The Wall Street Journal also reported on this settlement, and the article noted that “QuinStreet says it doesn’t consider the website misleading, but reached the agreement to provide greater clarity.”
QuinStreet is a publicly traded marketing and media company that operates websites on descriptive domain names in a number of verticals. You may recall that QuinStreet paid a reported $35.6 million for Insurance.com and a reported $16 million for Insure.com. The company also acquired CarInsurance.com, Internet.com, and several other websites for significant sums of money.
Goes to show the general public can’t tell the difference between .com and .gov.