How far would you go for clicks on your affiliaite links?

Typosquatting: Brilliant or Bogus?

A Little Bit of Background Info

I have not posted for a very long time on my Wealthy Affiliate Blog. For that, I apologize. I am sorry for depriving you of my brilliant blogging skills. Kidding! I have just been busy busy busy. I was hoping to start my online entrepreneur certification class this year, but instead, I have put all my time and energy into my e-commerce store/blog.

Anyway, it was a bit of a happy accident that I ended up posting on the Wealthy Affiliate blog today. As I was sitting down to work on something with my site, I typed in the URL for Wealthy affiliate, as I always do, albeit I was in a bit of a rush. Instead of typing wealthyaffiliate.com, I type wealthyaffilaite.com. If you don't see the difference, the 'a' and 'i' are swapped, and not in their correct position in the word affiliate.

Has anyone else ever done this? It can not just be me who tends to type a bit dyslexic when I am not paying attention.

My Hypothesis

If the hypothesis of this post is correct, not only are others making this mistake, BUT someone, most likely a wealthy affiliate member, is capitalizing off of unassuming people who are either dyslexic or, like me a bit sloppy when rushing. Oh, I should probably mention another theory to be fair. The owner of the domain may be the dyslexic one, making a mistake when purchasing the domain, possibly even realizing his mistake and deciding to capitalize on the idea that others would inevitably make the same said mistake. The Wealthy Affiliate Imposter

Okay, okay, I am sure you are all thinking, JEEZZZ, Ashley, get on with it! I am, so you surely are as well. When I navigate to the misspelled Wealthy Affiliate site, henceforward the imposter site, (URL:wealthyaffilaite.com) I am pretty astounded by what I see. The homepage of the imposter site looks like this:

Interestingly, if you click on the links, they all go to different affiliate sites. For example, when I click on the second link, 'Scam Wealthy Affiliate,' this page comes up:

When I click to visit the website, I am taken to AffiliateMarketingRocks.com (noting here that the person magically learned to spell affiliate, BTW!):

Interestingly enough, this article promotes WA, so I begin to think, hmm, this is just a clever WA member. Think about it, if this person can corral all of the people looking for WA, who are either dyslexic or in a rush, to read his article, and click on HIS affiliate link for WA, he will ultimately be in for a payday. Of course, I was curious to see how many times this mistake was being made by people researching affiliate programs, but was not able to find any data on SEMrush.com. If this peaked your interest, and you find out, let me know.

So, I did some more snooping and clicked on another one of the links on the imposter site homepage:

It took me to solobuildit.com:

Now, this article was not quite as kind to the WA program. Whoever wrote this either had a really bad experience within Wealthy Affiliate or is extremely loyal to one of their competitors! Either way, I was more confused as to who the heck put this imposter site together, as it was looking a little counterproductive now, promoting and then discouraging people to join Wealthy Affiliate.

Notably, there are those who believe all press is good press and even negative reviews draw traffic and eyeballs to a website. I decided I would look into this site a bit further and I ended up on another page, sitesell.com. The article I landed on was a comparison of the Solo Build It program and the Wealthy Affiliate program.

As you can see in the image below, the writer bashes Wealthy Affiliate, saying "Wealthy Affiliate offers no refund, just a time-wasting freemium." The writer defends his argument by pointing out that Wealthy Affiliate's 'try it free' setup is all a ploy to try to get an upsell, which we all know is not true. If you wanted to build your whole site on a free account, you could! You just wouldn't have access to all the wonderful training and the beautiful community here at Wealthy Affiliate.

It becomes increasingly obvious that the purpose of this article is to lead potential WA- interested internet surfers toward the SBI! program, with their 90-day refund policy. Here is the image I was referring to:

Lastly, I clicked on a third link and was directed to yet another site, 10ppm.com. This site seemingly has to do with a trading strategy. It did not seem to have anything to do with affiliate marketing:

Does all of this seem odd to anyone else? Is this some sort of sales funnel? Do you think one person owns all these different sites that this imposter site is linking to? Do you think this is one of our members? Do you think this is a successful way to get some of Wealthy Affiliates' sloppy seconds? Well, sloppy typers, anyway! And yes, that would put me in that category. Had I not looked carefully, and had I not known much about the REAL Wealthy Affiliate site and platform, I may have been duped, or at least been talked out of joining the WA community.

So, I did a little more research and came across a term called typosquatting. Have any of you heard of this term?

Typosquatting

McAfee.com defines typosquatting (or URL hijacking), as a form of cybersquatting targeting Internet users who incorrectly type a website address into their web browser (e.g., “Gooogle.com” instead of “Google.com”). Cybersquatting means sitting on sites under someone else’s brand or copyright.

It is when users make a typographical error while typing out the domain name(just as I did) and they are led to an alternative website owned by a hacker. McAfee explains that typosquatters usually design these sites for malicious purposes. Now I do not think, the owner of the imposter site designed his site with malicious intent, nor do I think he is a hacker. However, I would be curious to hear his motivations, as well as how well his site performs.

The Drive-By Download

Some typosquatters design sites that can automatically download malicious software to your device simply by visiting the site. McAfee reports, "you don’t even need to click on a link or accept a download for dangerous code to install on your computer, smartphone, or tablet." This is called a drive-by download and this software can steal personal information from unassuming, quick typing victims.

Phishing

Phishing is another way that typosquatters prey on victims. An email is sent to a list of contacts. The email looks like a legitimate email sent from a legitimate company. However, the link contained in the call of action is not the legitimate companies website. An interesting example of this tactic was made when AnnualCreditReport.com was launched. Shortly after the launch date, multiple domain names, with barely recognizable typos were purchased. These new domains with intentional typos in their addresses are specifically designed to trick people who visited the sites. Like real fishing, these emails serve as the bait getting people to click their link. Once clicked, the person is on the hook, visiting the fraudulent site. Once hooked, multiple other tactics are employed to do tons of other malicious things, such as steal personal information, download viruses onto your computer, trick you into making a payment on your credit card, or even something as simple as clicking on their affiliate links.

Selling the URL to the Company

In other situations, some people buy misspelled domain names hoping that a company (the one who owns the correctly spelled domain name) will buy it from them to prevent confusion and loss of customers. Many smart companies, especially the bigger ones that can afford this, will buy their domain as well as the common misspellings of their domain names. Then, they will redirect all the traffic from the misspelled domains to the correct domain. This prevents typosquatters from breaking havoc on their customer base. You can see where the profit could come in here though. If a person is holding a commonly misspelled version of your domain name hostage, you may pay a pretty penny to prevent attacks on your customers.

More Examples: Google.com vs. Goggle.com

For some more examples of Typosquatting, including a real-life example that happened with the well-known Google.com site, check out What is Typosquatting?

Protect Yourself From Typosquatters

McAfee recommends you protect yourself against typosquatters in the following ways:

• Pay close attention to the spelling of web addresses or websites that look trustworthy but may potentially be close imitations of the online retailer you are looking for.
• Instead of typing the web address into your computer, make sure you have a safe search tool, like McAfee® SiteAdvisor® which comes with McAfee® LiveSafe™ that provides warning of malicious sites in your browser search results.
• Don’t click on links in emails, texts, chat messages, or social networking sites.
• Invest in a comprehensive security solution that protects all your devices, your identity, and your data.

What Do You Think?

So, it seems obvious that the owner of this imposter site purchased the domain hoping unassuming internet surfers would click on his WA affiliate links. Or maybe he was just trying to sell the SBI! program, and bash Wealthy Affiliate? It seems odd to encourage readers to do two opposite things, but maybe he figures whichever link the visitor follows is a shot at profits.

What do you guys think?

If the member who owns this domain is a wealthy affiliate member and reads this, I would love to hear what his or her goals with this site are.

Have any of you done anything like this? If so, have you had success with this method?

I am looking forward to hearing your opinions!