As of 13th June, 2020
Covid-19 has affected every sphere of life. The world economy is still in speculation about the damage the Virus has done to it. The same virus has also given way to a number of scamming and phishing cases online. This time two domain names: MyVerizonWirelessCovid19.com and VerizonWireless-Covid-19.net were registered in bad faith reported Thomson Reuters.
US based Keith Walker, registered the domains as the pandemic hit. Verizon went to WIPO as the domains clearly infringed trademark rights of the Wireless company. The panelists at WIPO also noticed that the domains looked ‘confusingly similar’ to Verizon with other words like ‘my’ and ‘Wireless’ not sufficient enough to provide the necessary uniqueness. The domains were thus transferred to Verizon.
This is one of the many such cases. As the Covid-19 crisis hit, a lot of Covid-19 websites became active. Many of those websites were put up just to steal visitors’ information as they were searching about the virus online in panic. Some of them were also put up to lure visitors of already popular websites by having a name similar to that popular website, with the word Corona being used as a suffix or a prefix. Gladly Verizon got it’s domain back. Thanks to Wipo!
You can read the WIPO Case Details here.
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