eBay wins a massive UDRP case.
eBay has successfully taken down over 1,000 domain names containing its trademark, many of which were set up as commerce sites.
The online auction company filed a UDRP against the owner of 1,153 .com and .net domain names. All of the domain names contained “ebay” followed by a series of numbers, such as ebay962.com, ebay623.net and ebay389.com.
The domain names were protected by a privacy service. When the privacy was removed, the whois records showed multiple owners. However, eBay convinced the panel that they were all the same owner or were working in concert. This is highly likely, given that the domains were all registered over two days in 2014.
Whomever owned the domain names didn’t respond to the complaint.
eBay successfully took down the sites and the domain names will be transferred to its control. But what will the company do with these 1,000+ fairly useless domain names? I’ll be curious to see if they renew them.
couponpages says
Since a lot of legitimate sites from eBay sellers have eBay in their names and they didn’t target them, this looks like a defensive move against one scammer.
Archive.org has nothing on file for those domains, so I can only assume the content was misleading and more like a phishing site.