The world's 500 biggest companies have all fallen victim to typosquatting. OUT-LAW research has found that the fast-growing trend of making ad money from web domains similar to famous brands affects all the world's biggest firms.
Typosquatting is the profiting, through adverts, from websites whose addresses are very close to famous brand names. A typical site could be microsift.com. When visitors go to a typosquatter's site they see adverts which, when displayed, pay the site operator a small fee.
Though the money earned by each advert is often only a few dollar cents, the volume of traffic and the number of domains held by professional typosquatters means that some are earning millions of dollars a year.
