Twitter Wins Ownership Over Scammy Twiter.com

Twitter has won its dispute of the Twiter.com domain name. The domain, while registered before Twitter came into being, was now being used to dupe unsuspecting visitors with scammy surveys.

The site used a similar design, logo and font to Twitter's making the scam even more believable.

Twitter didn't really appreciate having its users take for a ride and filed a dispute with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to get ownership of the domain, justifying this by the offending site's behaviour.

It was a pretty open and shut case for WIPO, the domain was obviously being misused and there was no legitimate business or even a legitimate website associated with it.

Twiter.com was initially registered in 2004, but the owner never did anything with the site. That is, until a while ago when the domain started redirecting to a survey scam site.

It seems that, initially, before it started redirecting users, Twiter.com was seeing some 125,000 visitors per month, quite a lot of people misspelling the site's name. But traffic has dropped off ever since to a lowly 2,000 visitors.

Twitter has won its dispute and now owns the domain, though the transfer hasn't been put in effect, the domain still redirects to the survey site for now.

Twitter's initial complaint also included twitter.biz. However, that complaint was terminated leading Twitter to file another one, the one that it won today. However, it managed to win ownership of twitter.biz from the initial complaint.

There are several other domains that Twitter can go after, twutter.com is an obvious one, especially since it also redirects to the scam site. Most interestingly, the site is no longer trying to replicate the look of Twitter and is now going after YouTube users instead.