Does the tagline "what you need, when you need it" ring a bell? Try visiting guugle.com if you need a reminder, but don’t click on any links or images! That tagline should be familiar to anyone who surfs the web regularly and runs into the periodic slumfest of advertising and phishing scams. While Dell certainly isn’t the first target of this kind of black market campaign, they’re mixing things up by taking the cybersquatters to court.

It’s easy to misspell a word or make a typo, especially since the QWERTY keyboard may have been designed to slow us down. Dell certainly understands that and if you visit delll.com they’ll still redirect you to the right home page. The conflict here is with other domains that could be easily confused with their products and services such as dwllfinancialservices.com. According to the lawsuit, which was opened to the public in November, Dell has filed a lawsuit against several domain registrars accusing them of cybersquatting 1,100 web addresses.

Dell’s challenge will be to prove that the registrars were using those domains to profit implicitly from traffic generated by its brands.

The root cause of this problem is a tendency for humans to believe what they see on a screen is legitimate. But tech-savvy people know better. So rather than ignore the clueless, educate them! Tell them that an all-encompassing tagline like "what you need, when you need it" should raise suspicion, and that a site without strong branding should make them cautious. Without an influx of cash, the cybersquatters will quickly move on.

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Entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 7:59 pm under Advertising, Crime.

Read more entries by Matt Jansen.
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