As a reminder to the virtues of not cybersquatting, Verizon was recently awarded a judgment of $33.15 million USD in a case against OnlineNIC.
A federal court in northern Calfifornia handed down a default ruling that OnlineNIC owes Verizon $50,000 for each of the 633 domains that could be confused with legitimate Verizon sites. Such squatted domains included verizononline.com, myverizonwireless.com and iphoneverizonplans.com. The fake sites carried a raft of pop-under adverts and spammy hosted advertisements all designed to drum up a few coins for OnlineNIC.
In the interim, nobody’s quite sure how Verizon will collect on the decision. No employees could be located for OnlineNIC, the firm did not appear at the court decision, and the company’s address came up bunk.
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