Twitter Wins Dispute Against Typosquatting Domain Twiter

In June, we reported that after waiting five years, Twitter had finally made the move to have the site Twiter.com shut down. The social network filed a domain dispute with the World Intellectual Property Organization and just five months later it has won the dispute.

Twiter.com, whose design was deceptively similar to Twitter, was in fact a scam site that was fooling users into participating in surveys. If users inadvertently misspelled Twitter in the address bar they could easily find themselves redirected to a survey claiming they had been selected to win a flashy prize, a scam used to collect personal user information.

The dispute, filed against Geico Inc is described on Fusible as an “open-and-shut case,” but the decision has not been put into effect as Twiter.com is still redirecting to a scam survey site, at the time of writing.

While Twiter.com was registered long before the social network Twitter came into existence,it wasn’t until after Twitter’s success that it was used to redirect to a scam survey, but over time, it’s traffic statistics dropped drastically going from 125,000 hits a month to just over 2,000 in the space of 9 months.

This is not the first time Twitter has taken down a site. It successfully went after twiter.biz, and shut it down, and with two disputes under its belt, ending in its favour, Twitter is bound to do the same with other similar scam sites. And it certainly isn’t the first or last company that has had to combat cybersquatting – a practice that has been targeted by countless organizations including the BBC, Microsoft and more.