Businessman George Marshall is said to have been buying Scottish town domain names on the cheap and then reselling them on a secondary market for thousands of pounds via his site Brandwise. Marshall, who reportedly purchased the domains for as little as 0.99p is currently selling Cumbernauld.co.uk for £4,995, Penicuik.co.uk for £2,995, Dalkeith.co.uk for £2495 and Cowdenbeath for £1995. He has been accused of attempting to cash in on the Scottish taxpayer who will foot the bill to reclaim their town’s domain name.

Marshall has defended his practice telling the Daily Record: “Domain names are for commercial use, can be registered by anyone and are lawfully traded on the secondary domain name market. Councils etc do not need to use co.uk domain names so are not being held to ransom. They have reserved rights to gov.uk domain names.”

Ransoming Online Identities

Angus MP Kirstene Hair said: “The practice of bulk-purchasing domain names or ‘cyber-squatting’ is almost as old as the internet itself. It’s a frustrating strategy which, while not illegal in the UK, can be combated if a trademark or similar domain name is affected.”

“It’s a real shame that Arbroath has lost a piece of its potential online identity, especially as we prepare to mark the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath. Visitors and interested parties could find themselves clicking on totally unrelated links in 2020 if this person does not have a change of heart.”

A spokeswoman for VisitScotland added: “Tourism is a vital part of the Scottish economy, creating jobs and sustaining communities. Visitors are increasingly turning to digital channels when looking for travel inspiration. We would be disappointed if any future opportunities to promote locations and increase tourism in towns and villages were hindered by restrictions to online resources.”

Cumbernauld MSP Jamie Hepburn said: “It does seem somewhat silly for someone to be needlessly hoarding these domain names when they could be put to use by local community groups, charities or bodies trying to promote some of the great businesses and amenities we have in Cumbernauld. I suspect we will probably manage to get by without having to fork out for this particular domain name and this ransom attempt will fail.”

Cybersquatting at All-Time High

According to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) cases of cybersquatting reached a record high in 2017. WIPO research revealed that the UK is the third out of 112 countries in terms of the highest incidents of alleged cybersquatting, just behind the US and France, which ranked first and second respectively.

WIPO Director General Francis Gurry said: “By abusing trademarks in the Domain Name System, cybersquatting undermines legitimate commerce and harms consumers. This is true especially where squatters use domain names to offer counterfeit goods or for phishing, as is seen in numerous WIPO cases.”

Cybersquatting is not a new problem, it has been a prevalent issue since 1999 with celebrities and big brand names falling victim to the practice. A cybersquatter will pre-order domain names with suffixes such as .web, .net and .org. Unless brands and companies are quick off the mark to register them they will then be forced to cough up large sums of money to regain their intellectual property or risk their customers being re-directed to a misleading website and ultimately suffer damage to their brand.

John-Lewis, Burberry, Tesco, and HSBC are just a few of the big name brands who have faced this issue in the past when unknown entities bought their domain with the addition of  .web or .info. Another method is typosquatting, which is regularly linked to phishing scams, this is when a cybersquatter registers subtle variants of a popular trademarked name to make it seem like the company or brand’s legitimate website.

Prevention Better Than the Cure

Companies, towns and brands wishing to avoid this pitfall do have the option to register their trademarks in the Trademark Clearinghouse, which enables them to secure all domain names relating to their intellectual property (IP) before they are available and be alerted if a third party tries to secure a domain matching their IP. If it is already ready too late to do this then companies can resort to legal measures to take back domain names, however, this can be costly and success is not guaranteed. It is not the route most travelled and many opt to pay the costly ransom instead.