Wednesday, May 23, 2007

The .CM scam

It's always good when your country of origin makes it around the blogsphere for a scam the government agreed to be a part of.   I first saw the story on Michael Arrington's TechCrunch.

The .CM pages are served based on a wildcard. If the domain has not been registered, the user is redirected to agoga.com. Since the redirects are taking place via a wildcard, and domains are not actually being registered, there is little trademark holders can do to fight this (other than register the domain themselves).

It seems the big companies are the ones that are most affected/annoyed by this scam except for one: Yahoo.  It  seems that Yahoo was actually smart enough to buy yahoo.cm domain.  You can read more about the guy behind the scan CNN money article.  I think this is deplorable and it's really shows how easily government in developing countries can be taken advantage of.  Hopefully, the Cameroonian government will move away from this deal as soon as it can.

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1 comment:

Aneesa said...

Henri, why haven't you posted anything since May? I really enjoyed the one about immigration reform. Keep writing!