Wwwsmarthome.com, LinkShare affiliate dZB3ZbaOgZY typosquatting on Smarthome.com

Twenty Oft-Found Commission Junction and LinkShare Affiliate Violations - Wesley Brandi and Ben Edelman

Our crawler requests Wwwsmarthome.com, a clear typographic error of Smarthome. (Consider a user who fails to type a period after "www" and before the intended domain name.)

Wwwsmarthome redirects to the LinkShare click link with affiliate ID dZB3ZbaOgZY, then on to Smarthome.

The user ends up where he expected, and may not notice that anything was wrong. But Smarthome has to pay an affiliate fee for this traffic. Meanwhile, were it not for this affiliate's action, a standard web browser would have offered a simple link to Smarthome at no charge to Smarthome.

Wwwsmarthome is a typosquatting domain within the meaning of ACPA and UDRP. If Smarthome were to challenge this domain, it could recover statutory damages (ACPA) as well as the domain itself (under both ACPA and UDRP).

Violations: Forced click, typosquatting

 

Packet log

GET http://wwwsmarthome.com/ ...
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
User-Agent: ...
Host: wwwsmarthome.com
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 23:42:23 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Location: http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=dZB3ZbaOgZY&offerid=224615.10000230&type=4&subid=0
Cache-Control: private
Content-Length: 0
Connection: Keep-Alive
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive

 

GET http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=dZB3ZbaOgZY&offerid=224615.10000230&type=4&subid=0 ...
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
User-Agent: ...
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
Host: click.linksynergy.com

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Set-Cookie: lsn_statp=oMj7%2FisAAAC9qA1dYP0xuQ%3D%3D; Domain=.linksynergy.com; Expires=Sat, 11-Dec-2032 23:42:23 GMT; Path=/
Set-Cookie: lsn_qstring=dZB3ZbaOgZY%3A224615%3A; Domain=.linksynergy.com; Expires=Mon, 17-Dec-2012 23:42:23 GMT; Path=/
Set-Cookie: lsn_track=UmFuZG9tSVaAPOO1euCWurmfW0PyJngxjYjQjTzL3CpIXsM1PZMndJlCK%2BiLubcXgjKv5Uyf5DZlE77%2BsxxVvw%3D%3D; Domain=.linksynergy.com; Expires=Wed, 14-Dec-2022 23:42:23 GMT; Path=/
Set-Cookie: lsclick_mid1845="2012-12-16 23:42:23.825|dZB3ZbaOgZY-92jfQx5YJX4RnnC%2AK1R3bA"; Domain=.linksynergy.com; Expires=Tue, 16-Dec-2014 23:42:23 GMT; Path=/
P3P: policyref="/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="NOI DSP COR CURa ADMa DEVa OUR BUS STA"
Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 23:42:23 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://www.smarthome.com/clickthru2.asp?siteID=dZB3ZbaOgZY-92jfQx5YJX4RnnC%2AK1R3bA&a=WLS00W08
Content-Length: 0
Cneonction: close
Connection: Keep-Alive
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive