The online porn world may be a juicy target for cybersquatters and other e-blackmailers and scammers, but The Hun would like to see it dry up before it bleeds him of any more revenue. The Hun's Yellow Pages - the adult site he runs with his wife from their home here - is not only one of the Internet's most visited sites, according to Wired, but it's also one of the choicest targets for domain name scam artists.
The Hun - whose real name is Patrick Terwee - has come close to losing the title to his site more than once, including to a scam artist who tried to auction one of his domain names on eBay until his attorney intervened. Another time, he came close to finding one of his domain names owned by an Eastern European, Wired says.
What makes it so attractive a target? In the past five years, The Hun's Yellow Pages is said to have grown to where it now draws some 800,000 unique visitors on a typical day. He can charge up to $900 a month for advertisers to get a spot on his site, which hosts links to free porn sites.
Two weeks ago, though, the Eastern European registered thehun.com, a domain name Terwee owns. "There's a lot of bullshit like this going on," he tells Wired. "The amount of time you have to spend on people who try to prosper off the success of the Yellow Pages is not even funny anymore."
He got the name back, he says, but the changeover stalled traffic to the Yellow Pages, to the point where it cost him thousands in ad revenue over several days. He's mulled a lawsuit, he tells Wired, but he'd first have to track down the person who tried the scam.
His attorney, Steven Workman, tells the magazine few cases like this even make it to court. For one thing, he says, scammers can get Network Solutions (which runs the database of sites) to do the transfer and then try to sell the domain to a third party. And for another, he says, the cons use phony identities, making it difficult to track them down in a cyberworld where impostorship is common.
Network Solutions tells Wired there's no evidence domain hijackings are rising - but when such cases happen, the usual cause, the company says, is domain name owners failing to opt for more sophisticated security systems NSI offers.
The hijacking battles are beginning to wear on Terwee, he tells the magazine. He's purchased two soundalike domain names (TheHon.com and TheHon.net) to keep rivals from trying a copycat site. But he also says his regular business of posting porn links is getting monotonous - the same routine every day of combing piles of e-mail from those hoping to be linked on The Hun's Yellow Pages.
"I have to manually go through every submission," he tells Wired. "It's getting pretty boring."
