County tourism website taken over by a gambling website

As of 12/04/2021

The midwestern state of Ohio witnessed a strange kind of situation. State’s Lorain county’s website was taken over by an Asian online poker company. 

According to a report by CardsChat, VisitLorainCounty.com, the county’s tourism website, now belongs to Poker678. The problem started when the domain name expired. The domain name was not renewed and got lapsed. The domain name was then quickly acquired by Indonesia’s Poker678.

Poker678 is an online poker website made exclusively for Asians. We can clearly see that there is hardly any relation of the company to the domain name. The domain name must have been acquired to sell it again to the original owners at an increased price. Cases like this are common instances of Cybersquatting. However fighting a cybersquatting case is a complex and costly affair. These online thugs take the advantage of this.

Although officials of the county were considering switching to a .gov domain name, this incident is tragic. The domain name now points to Poker678’s website.