The .CM Scam

It’s difficult to consider this a scam, because it seems to pass through many legal loopholes. What Kevin Ham negotiated, is that all traffic from a non-registered domain with Cameroons TLD would automatically be passed through to his ad site.

Business 2.0’s Paul Sloan has been digging into the .CM domain name scam. A domain name broker managed to convince the government of Cameroon, which controls .cm, to do a deal where any mis-typed domain name, like Google.cm (instead of google.com), takes the visitor to an advertising-filled landing page (the ads are served by Yahoo).

Bear in mind that .cm is a common mistake. I have even found myself typing it in by accident. This is is sheer brilliance from a business standpoint as it could be worth billions over time. However, it is no surprise that no one is pleased, except Kevin Ham’s pocketbook of course.

Source: Tech Crunch