A similar-looking IDN might have added to the confusion.
A Turkish insurance company has been found to have tried reverse domain name hijacking, and it appears that a look-alike IDN might have been partially responsible for tripping it up.
Türkiye Varlik Fonu A.Ş. filed the dispute (pdf) against TurkiyeSigorta.com. Sigorta means insurance in Turkish.
Despite its rather descriptive nature, the company has a trademark for TÜRKİYE SİGORTA, which was filed in 2020.
However, the registrant of the domain at issue acquired it in 2017, three years prior to the filing of the trademark application.
The Complainant seemed to acknowledge this in its complaint, but then made a contradictory argument. World Intellectual Property Organization panelist Mehmet Polat Kalafatoğlu wrote:
The Panel recognizes that the Complainant’s trademark, as of today, is widely recognized in Türkiye for insurance services. However, the essential question in this case is whether the Respondent acted in bad faith at the time he registered the disputed domain name. In the Complaint, the Complainant itself states that the disputed domain name was registered on January 27, 2017, and the Complainant’s trademark was registered before the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office on April 13, 2020 (the Complaint, pages 4 and 6). Then, the Complainant merely asserts that “the domain name was registered in 2017, significantly after the Complainant’s trademark rights were established and widely recognized in Türkiye”. (the Complaint, page 7) However, the Complainant has not provided any supporting evidence that it had trademark rights on TÜRKİYE SİGORTA at an earlier date than the registration of the disputed domain name. In addition to the trademark registration date, the evidence submitted by the Complainant shows that the company “Türkiye Sigorta A.Ş.” (the subsidiary of the Complainant) was founded in 1957 with its former corporate name “Güneş Sigorta A.Ş.” and it later received the corporate name “Türkiye Sigorta A.Ş.” in 2020 (Annex 5 of the Complaint, page 8). As claimed by the Respondent, the official website of the said company (turkiyesigorta.com.tr) also announces that it was founded in 2020 with the merger of three different companies. Therefore, based on the available record, the Panel concludes that the Complainant’s statement is chronologically inaccurate.
This was the primary reason the panelist found this was a case of reverse domain name hijacking, especially since the domain owner informed the insurance company about its chronological issues prior to the complaint being filed.
There is another interesting aspect to this case. The Complainant alleged that the Respondent was using the domain to impersonate it and interact with people over WhatsApp. However, the domain it made those allegations against was apparently türkiyesigorta .com. Note the Turkish letter ü in place of the u.
Asist Patent Ltd. Şti. represented the Complainant.
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