We’ve all done it. We’ve typed 'Goggle' when we meant 'Google'. We’ve hit 'Youutbe' when we were trying to type 'Youtube'. We’ve clicked through to 'Craglist' when we were trying to get to 'Craigslist'. It happens. But such typos and eye-is-quicker-than-the-hand errors you see as dumb mistakes, others see as a business venture.
What do you get when you actually go to goggle.com? A site smarmily selling computers, of which you can win one by divulging just a little bit of your personal and private information. YouUtbe.com? Hey look, they sell cameras, software, and DVD’s to make your own online videos. Shocking. Craglist.com gets you a site that asks for your name and email to win a prize. It’s a game that few of us think about. It’s the world’s oldest industry of scam, the art of misdirection. It’s a practice known as 'typosquatting'. It’s just like what it sounds.
The above examples are for the most part harmless. You mistyped, and you get to be advertised to. No harm no foul. Some sites are a little more nefarious. The most infamous example is a former site known as 'whitehouse.com'. Their game was hoping that people (and unfortunately, many kids) would go to their website trying to get the President’s White House. But instead, they were sent to an extraordinarily explicit porn site. Their game was betting you would unwittingly type in 'whitehouse.com' instead of the real White House site, 'whitehouse.gov'. PC World once ranked it at the 13th worst website on the Internet, and rightly so. (Note: 'whitehouse.com' is now a find-a-lawyer page.)
Some companies have battled this problem with what is known as "catch-all typosquatting", an example of which is when a company buys the domain names of all the possible typos of their website they can think of. For example, no matter whether you type 'coca-cola.com', 'coke.com', 'cocacola.com', or 'cocacola.biz', they all take you to the real Coke website (go ahead, try it). And for ones that the company doesn’t catch, some ISP’s and search sites have come together to automatically detect typos and send you to either a specified search engine, or to an advertising page with links to items related to your incorrect 'hotword'.
And then there are the most dangerous typo scams: ones where the mistyped page pretends to be the site you intended to visit. At best, it advertises to you. At worst, it’s a stealthy form of phishing, stealing your log-in and password, and with it, your personal information. These sites look just like the sites you originally wanted to go to like Facebook or Myspace or even your utility or your bank - same colors, same fonts, same page - but then when you try to log in, bam, they have your password. You weren’t careless, you weren’t naïve to security, you weren’t loose with your personal info. You just mistyped.
This was in the news recently when Facebook (the real one) won a National Arbitration Forum case against the shady owners of the websites Facebok.com, Facebooj.com, and Faceboook.com, sites that present themselves as looking and acting just like Facebook (the real one) to get you to buy computers, share personal information, and download dodgy files. This one site will be now forced to redirect back to Facebook (the real one). But there are as many fake sites as there are real ones, and some companies (specifically Facebook itself) that don’t keep as watchful an eye on the issues as others.
The moral is take care, be careful, especially when job hunting because we often want to glean our info from as many places as we can, because for every CareerBuilder.com and Monster.com, there’s a dozen CarrerBuilder.com’s and Munster.com’s just looking for your personal info.
Michael Hochman
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Michael is a Copywriter, Creative Marketer, and Broadcaster with 15 years in Programming, Marketing, Promotions, and New Media at television and radio stations in markets like Philadelphia, Syracuse, Albany, Wichita, and Kansas City, as an advertising writer in marketing departments and at ad agencies, and as a freelance copywriter. A Philly native and graduate of Syracuse University's Newhouse School, Michael is available for freelance work, full-time writing, and wedding receptions.
"Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright." - Aaron Sorkin, "The West Wing"
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