How Amazon.com cheats just like the porn industry

Today I was made aware of something that’s been pestering the Internet for ages. A trend that the pornography industry started ages ago, and has fooled more than one innocent web user. We all know how easy it is to make typos, both in letters, e-mails and when we enter the web address of the site we want to go to.

This of course is really annoying, especially when we’re at work when we try to make this office friendly. So what is this method that so many uses to fool innocent Internet users? Well, the technique is as easy as it is in terms of ingenious. What companies do, is that they register a domain name with a very similar spelling to a popular website.

For instance, it might be gooogle.com, googel.com, gogle.com etc. All possible misspellings of the word Google might get you to a site you didn’t ask for. So what happens when you misspell the domain name? Well, you’re taken to a page which in effect redirects your request to another site. This is something that the porn industry has done for ages and has gained millions upon millions of unjustified hits.

So what is it that Amazon has done? Well, this has not been confirmed but still, it is somewhat suspicious that the domain name facebok.com, which bears striking resemblance to the popular facebook.com, in fact redirects its users to amazon.com.

Using a WHOIS lookup on the domain yields very little information, as the true identity of the company/individual that registered the domain has been concealed by a privacy service. The WHOIS output is as follows:

Registrant:
   Domains by Proxy, Inc.
   DomainsByProxy.com
   15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
   Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
   United States

   Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
   Domain Name: FACEBOK.COM
      Created on: 22-Apr-04
      Expires on: 22-Apr-08
      Last Updated on:

   Administrative Contact:
      Private, Registration  [email protected]
      Domains by Proxy, Inc.
      DomainsByProxy.com
      15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353
      Scottsdale, Arizona 85260
      United States
      (480) 624-2599

As you can see, not much information is available to go by here. And being a user of the registrar GoDaddy myself, I know that the only way to get information about the actual owner requires to mail the address stated in the above output. So there is no way of pinpointing who actually owns the domain.

Rumour has it, it’s a third-party company has been used to perform this task for amazon.com. Amazon.com has yet to come forward and comment on the matter, but if it is found to be true that Amazon.com stoops to this sort of level to gain even more customers I must admit that I’m disappointed in them.

Amazon.com is such a good trade mark in the first place, and anyone spending a bit of time online can’t have missed their online presence in some way. Everyone knows what Amazon.com does, and it should be unnecessary for them to do such a thing.

Nobody likes a cheater, especially when someone that you in some way respect does something like this. I will wait in great anticipation for what Amazon.com has to say about this matter.

I’ll keep you all informed.