Typosquatting

Typosquatting (also called URL hijacking) is a specific form of cybersquatting in which a registrant registers common misspellings, transpositions, or near-homoglyphs of a high-traffic domain — for example, replacing one letter, adding a hyphen, or swapping a character for a lookalike — to intercept the type-in traffic that flows from users who mistype the intended address. The captured visitors are then monetized through pay-per-click ads, redirected to a competing service, or directed to a phishing page designed to harvest credentials. Most typosquatting of trademarked brand names is actionable under the UDRP or the US ACPA, which both cover confusingly similar registrations. Tokenizing a typosquatted domain does not change its legal exposure; Namefi and other on-chain domain services are built on real DNS registrations, which remain subject to standard dispute mechanisms. Savvy brand owners register their own common typos defensively and point them to the canonical domain. Source: Cloudflare Learning.