Twitter, Inc. has won a dispute over the highly trafficked typo domain name Twiter.com that led visitors to an online scam survey site.
A panel with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) ruled in favor of Twitter.
Twiter.com was registered long before Twitter.com became what it is today. Its first owner registered the domain in 2004, nearly 2 years before Jack Dorsey launched the site.
However, ever since filing the dispute with WIPO (Case No. D2011-1210), it has seemed to be an open-and-shut case against Geigo Inc (the respondent) who has used the web address for a malicious survey scam.
When twiter.com resolved to its own web page, it hit over 100,000 unique visitors per month according to a rough traffic estimate by Compete.
But months ago, Geigo (the respondent) began re-directing visitors from twiter.com to socialupdatepanel.com, a scam survey site (pictured above) that looked confusingly similar to Twitter’s own website. A message on the home page told visitors they had been selected to participate in a three-question survey, and for completing the survey, they would be able to select a prize like an iPhone 4 or iPad 2. The site attempted to collect personal information such as cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
In July, I wrote about Twitter taking control of twiter.biz. Twitter had originally filed a dispute with WIPO over twiter.com in June, then days after filing the dispute it added twiter.biz to the same complaint. For one reason or another, the case was eventually suspended, then terminated, but not before Twitter was able to get twiter.biz.
After Twitter took control of twiter.biz, it filed a new complaint (Case No. D2011-1210) in July targeting only the twiter.com domain name.
Now with the twiter.com win under its belt, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the company file disputes against other typo domains such as twutter.com, which uses the same type of redirect to a scam survey site as twiter.com has used.
Update at 10:34 a.m. ET on Nov. 11: The full administrative panel decision has been posted online. Twitter Inc. has also filed a new complaint over the domain Twittter.com (with an extra ‘t’).
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