£.com posted as SOLD on Sedo at $1000

[Rubber Duck]

No doubt a lot of scammers are going to attempt to ruin this.. Just by looking at the eBay auction shows how easy it is to spoof a domain. Also spammers are going to pounce all over it by spoofing domain names once they become widely known.

Spam is a problem, but I think it is a little premature to blame IDN. I probably get several hundred spams a day and I can't say that I have yet attributed a single one to IDN! Now considering we own over 2,000 that says something about the size of problem.

Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[Bramiozo]

A shame indeed Radistar, with sèx it's quite obvious, but bowlíng.com ?
Why not contact Ebay ?

 

[rawkinrich]

eBay is full of this sh*t. They should have some categories stopped.

 

[diverge]

Many people have no idea what those accents and strokes over the regular letters mean. They might bid on domains thinking they are getting the real thing.

Accents aren't the only ways to defraud people with domains. You all remember the lrish.com debacle? How about this one, which is clearly trying to deceive someone to buy www-mario.com when they think they are buying mario.com:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5740100776

I've already reported it to SafeHarbor (seven hours ago). It's still up as of right now... we'll see if eBay takes it down.

 

[Domagon]

IDNs as they stand now present a very serious problem when it comes to spoofing as the recent Ebay listings illustrate.

Here are some examples - please check my math; even if I'm off, there are still a lot of combinations nevertheless.

* edit: just ran some more calculations - the number of combinations appears to be even higher!

amazon.com = 588 combinations with IDNs

dnforum.com = 60 combinations with IDNs

ebay.com = 210 combinations with IDNs

google.com = 180 combinations with IDNs

yahoo.com = 756 combinations with IDNs

And one of my domains tops them all with 3920 combinations with IDNs. One of those times in which pursuing legal action as needed is likely much cheaper than trying to register the other 3919 domains upfront.

And keep in mind my numbers are based only on the characters in one character set ... see url below:

http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/html/tagpages/entities/charentity224-255.htm

Other character sets exist, some of which also contain similar (possibly even exact!) looking characters.

What a mess!

Ron

 

[rawkinrich]

Agreed. I'd like to see how they sort.

 

[freestyler]

doesn't convince me to register any IDN'S

 

[rawkinrich]

doesn't convince me to register any IDN'S

A domain that was fairly easy to register in the first place that sold for 1k, and single word IDN's thats sold for a fair packet in the first place is enough for me to register IDN's.

 

[freestyler]

A domain that was fairly easy to register in the first place that sold for 1k, and single word IDN's thats sold for a fair packet in the first place is enough for me to register IDN's.

good luck!

 

[rawkinrich]

good luck!

Thanks

:santa:

 

[Rubber Duck]

Nothing is confirmed as of yet - the future will tell for IDN's.

You never know, £.com could turn out to be completley worthless.

Bücher.de - would you ever need to use the 'ü'? No-one in the states will be interested in Bücher.de. Just the Germans, living in Germany. (Obviously, Germans in the states may want to take a look, but the .de extension pretty much means its local).

IDN's more or less are local - there are many German sites using them that we have never heard of. There are many .de IDN's been sold and used, and its intended for the German market, not anywhere else.

By the middle of the next century the US will be an economic also ran, so what exactly is you problem!

Regards
Dave Wrixon