How To Kill the Typo/Misdirection Scam on the Web

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Inside the Internet.

The Typo Millionaires

The sordid history of the oldest scam on the Internet—and how to kill it off once and for all.

By Paul Boutin

Posted Friday, Feb. 11, 2005, at 2:54 PM PT

There's one Internet scam that's unavoidable, at least if your typing is as bad as mine. For almost as long as the Web has existed, there's been a thriving economy of sites, services, and software vying to grab you as soon as your mistype a URL. When I worked at HotBot a decade ago, part of my job was to handle the angry, confused callers who stumbled into the parallel universes of htobot.com and hotbto.com. At a boom-era party in Silicon Valley, I met a woman who'd goosed her income by developing software that took a list of the most-visited Web sites, calculated the most likely typos that surfers would make trying to reach them, and automatically registered those domains if they were available. She then raked it in by serving ads to the accidental tourists who landed on her sites.

Read more here:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2113397/