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The Typo Millionaires
theodp writes "Slate's Paul Boutin reports on the sordid history of the oldest scam on the Internet. For almost as long as the Web has existed, there's been a thriving economy of sites, services, and software vying to grab you as soon as your mistype a URL. Studies estimate that 10-20% of all hand-entered URLs are mistyped, adding up to at least 20 million wrong numbers per day, helping to enrich the likes of porn purveyors, ISP's, Paxfire, Microsoft and VeriSign."
This goes way beyond typos. There is a whole cottage industry of people registering domain names that unwary site owners allow to expire. I've heard several stories of church groups who accidentally let their domain expire and within a matter of days it had teen porn on it.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I work for a company that exploits mistyped URLs.
From our business, we found that a dial up user does an average of 4 bad requests a month and a broadband user an average of 10.
Iraq: war to save the U
slsahdot.org
AT&T had a national collect-calling campaign telling people to "Dial 1-800-Operator."
A competitor, MCI IIRC, quickly snatched up the number 1-800-Operater and got lots of the business from the campaign.
So it's not just URL's that get the typo business.