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Valentine’s Day Could be Dangerous for Online Consumers

Corporation Service Company^® (CSC), the leading corporate identity and brand protection company, today announced that a 500% increase in domain name registrations containing the word ‘valentine’ has occurred in the week prior to 14th February. Although many of these names will be used legitimately, it is advisable for companies to be vigilant as these domain names could be used as part of e-mail spam programs or to divert Internet traffic away from legitimate company or brand Web sites.

Using the Domain Detector^sm monitoring service, CSC gathered results which indicated 88 percent of the Valentine’s Day domains resolved to an active Web site. Of these Web sites, 45% are used for pay-per-click advertising and 38% are associated with the sales of goods. However, the concern is that many of these names maybe used by prolific spammers to launch attacks on unsuspecting consumers over the Valentine’s Day holiday. The FBI has already issued news releases to warn people of potential ‘malware’ attacks during this period. The results further showed generic domain extensions – such as .com and .net – were the most popular accounting for 76% of the newly registered names, followed by the .co.uk with 16%. The data showed the most popular terms used within the domain names were ‘gift’ and ‘flower’.

“I think these results highlight the fact that domain names, when used legitimately, are a great way to generate additional traffic to your Web site. However, we are concerned about the use of these names by people who want to cause disruption on the Internet.” said Robert Rozicki, a Product Manager and Senior Analyst with CSC. “We believe that companies should diligently monitor new registrations that could impact or infringe on their brands. This way they can take immediate action to protect their customers from fraudulent online practices.”