News Munchies
'Porn Napping' Catches Napping Domain Registrants
Originally Posted
Updated
Just a friendly public service reminder: Keep your Web registration up to date.
We hear the stories all the time. Someone is 15 minutes late renewing his domain name for Lace Doilies and Precious Cabbage Moments and Bam! The name is hijacked by a porn site!
If we were only about making money at CornerBarPR.comSM, we'd change our business model, for pornographers and "adult" sites operate by far the most lucrative corner of the Web.
And these folks have figured out how to make themselves even more ubiquitous: They make a fetish of monitoring domain expirations that fall through the cracks, betting on the come, and sucking up as many as they can handle. Then they simply redirect innocent traffic to come to their porn or, occasionally, gambling sites.
If you act quickly, you may be able to buy your domain name back, but be prepared to spend big bucks. A squatter may put porn on your old site just to blackmail you into acting quickly. And you probably won't have much luck suing registrants listing office addresses in, say, Armenia, Estonia, and Kyrgyzstan.
If you post links to other sites, watch out. Not too long ago, a U.S. Department of Education site was inadvertently redirecting people to porn sites -- more than a dozen of them.
We'll bet those visitors got an education!