The domain name for your business is an important choice and it should be protected against hackers trying to steal the domain name or the customer traffic it gets.
Once you have a domain name e.g. mybusiness.co.uk then you face the choice of whether it’s worth buying the same name with different extensions e.g. mybusiness.com, mybusiness.uk, mybusiness.london etc.
If you think you might lose customers to other variants on your domain name, then it may be worth the extra small cost to buy more domain names and redirect the traffic from them to your main site, otherwise it could be pointless.
Some people specialise in buying and selling domain names.
They have two basic ways of working-
- They look for variants on high profile web site names and see if they can buy any similar names. These might be misspellings on the original name or very similar names or the same name with different extensions etc. They buy up any they think will sell for a high price.
- They do as above but don’t actually buy any domain names.
They can then contact the owner of the high profile web site and offer to sell them the variants and spin a story on how it is essential for the owner to buy all variants on the name.
For the ones who take the risk and buy the domain names, it’s a little akin to blackmail but they take a risk and see which ones pay off and it is legal.
For those who don’t risk their own money (i.e. don’t buy the domain names and just pretend to have them) it is legal but more of a con as the owner can just buy the domain names they want directly without having to pay an inflated cost from the scammer.
If you have any experiences with phishing scams do let me know, by email.
