Two companies running premium-rate phone competitions from ‘typosquatted’ sites have been fined £100,000
Roger Rawlinson, managing director, Assurance division, NCC Group comments:
“Domain name squatting, using common typos or alternative suffixes to the more common .com and .co.uk, is a favourite method for cyber criminals to harvest useful data. Internet users clearly suffer through losing sensitive information and money through these scams, but the imitated websites are also damaged through association.
“It’s obviously a good thing that those responsible have been fined and the websites removed. However, the tribunal only came about via a premium rate phone regulator because consumers were misled about pricing, and not because the websites were misleading in the first place.
“Customers led to a false website once are likely to avoid the genuine site in the future, and companies that do not review and regulate the internet landscape for cyber squatters are at real risk of losing revenue and reputation.
“Organisations have their own reputations to uphold and should be fighting this threat at the source, scanning for imitation websites and launching takedown processes. It’s about brand protection as much as crime prevention."