Cybersquatting on the rise

Fraudsters are increasingly hijacking the brands or names of legitimate companies to lure people to their websites.

Mark Monitor said its research found that the number of incidents had risen 18 per cent over the past year to 1,722,133 sites, and most of these remain live.

Cybersquatting and brand-jacking, the practice of registering misleading domain names and using trademarked brand names, are used by crooks because they know people often mistype company names or brands.

The sites are then used for criminal activities such as phishing attacks, to sell counterfeit goods or divert people to pornographic sites. More than 400 company brands are attacked each month by phishing attacks or malicious software scams.

The fraudsters even attempt to blackmail companies by selling these domain names back to the legitimate companies whose name they have ‘brand-jacked’ at inflated prices.

The practice is particularly prevalent in the UK, Germany and the US, according to Mark Monitor.

Frederick Felman, Mark Monitor’s chief marketing officer, said: "We're seeing online brand abuse mature as a criminal activity.

"They are honing their techniques as they continue building revenue on the good names of leading brands globally. That 80 per cent of abuse sites identified in our study last year remain active today confirms that it is economically sustainable for fraudsters."

The fastest growing abuse surrounds the brand names of clothing and accessories followed by technology and automotive products. Most of these websites are hosted in the US, but Mark Monitor found that nine per cent were hosted in Germany and four per cent in the UK.

The most common domain suffixes used by the fraudsters to register misleading websites are .com and the so-called country codes, including .uk, .eu and .us.