Facebook sues OnlineNIC for domain name fraud associated with malicious activity

Facebook says these domains are intentionally designed to mislead and confuse end users, who believe theyre interacting with Facebook.

While some who register such domains hope to eventually sell them back to Facebook at a marked up price, earning a profit, others have worse intentions. Facebook was recently able to take down some of these, like facebooktoken.org and ico-facebook.org, one of which had already started collecting personal information from visitors by falsely touting a Facebook ICO.

Facebooks new lawsuit, however, focuses specifically on OnlineNIC, which Facebook says has a history of allowing cybersquatters to register domains with its privacy/proxy service, ID Shield. The suit alleges that the registered domains, like hackingfacebook.net, are being used for malicious activity, including phishing and hosting websites that purported to sell hacking tools.

The suit also references some 20 other domain names that are confusingly similar to Facebook and Instagram trademarks, it says.

Facebook today proactively reports instances of abuse with domain name registrars and their privacy/proxy services, and often works with them to take down malicious domains.

The news of the lawsuit was previously reported by Cnet and other domain name news sources, based on courthouse filings.

Original article