Typosquatting
Registering misspellings of popular domains to catch mistyped traffic, often for ads or phishing.
- glossary
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; 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.
Related keywords
- typosquatting
- typo domain
- phishing
- brand abuse
- cybersquatting
Contributors
Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.
Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.
His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.
For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.