Monday, March 27, 2006

A Softer Side to CyberSquatters

Since our Wired.com fanboy is out on maternity leave, I'll do the daily Wired.com article pimpin'. Wired.com had an interesting article about the new breed of everyone's favorite con-men, the CyberSquatter. Everyone who registers domain names has at least once forgotten to renew a domain name and had one of these snakes take their domain from them, throw Adsense ads up, and put it for sale for $1000. It makes my blood boil.

Well, there is a new breed of CyberSquatters and to me they are just as bad as the originals. These people are registering domain names of up and coming amateur athletes with hopes that one of them will make it big. Since the courts will now usually side with the celebrity and force the name to be turned over these new squatters have decided to become businessmen. Instead of holding these .com names for a high ransom these people will now offer complete web services. Web site hosting, web site design and other services are just some of the features the new squatters are offering.

It's still a scam to me. Holding an $8 domain name, which they shouldn't have anyway, for thousands of dollars of services in most cases. I wish I knew someone with an obscenely large number of premium domain names :)

By Jason Dowdell at 11:35 AM | Comments (0)

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