Last week Vikas sent an email to me sometime late in the afternoon…

I am currently with OptusNet and every-time I type in your website OzBargain, it goes to eBay…

Have you done something?

Yes I know sometimes I uploaded half-baked scripts onto OzBargain which caused all kinds of mess, but seriously I have not been able to work on the website for a few weeks due to general busyness. Moreover, why am I sending visitors to eBay? No way! So, maybe Optus stuffed something up? Or maybe OzBargain got hacked and the intruder now redirects everyone to eBay instead (which does have bargains every now and then). I quickly log back onto the site. Check the logs. Nope. Works for me, and I can’t seem to be able to reproduce the issue (always happen at work anyway so I am used to false alarms). Maybe if there is indeed some issues with the network, I’ll be flooded with the emails anyway so I would just wait and see…

An hour later Vikas wrote back and apologised his mistakes.

Scott — Found the problem

Click on this link and see for yourself: <OzBargain with one of ‘a’ missing>.com.au and it goes to eBay.

It must be an honor for ebay to try and get your traffic.

Huh? I know lots of people hate eBay but I do not think they will go this low to typo-squat OzBargain’s domain to get visitors. So I trace the link, and the first hop it brought me to rover.ebay.com/…. For those who are not familiar with it, it is eBay’s partner/affiliate link. So basically if you missed an “a” in the domain name, instead of coming to OzBargain to share the best deals in Australia, you’ll end up on eBay.com.au. Moreover, everything you have purchased on eBay will send a piece of seller fee to the guy who typo-squatted our domain.

Yes. Did I say a “guy”? A bit of googling reveals all the details I need — name, address, phone number, photo + a few other domains as well. While it is permissible to typo-squat domains on gTLD (and people will hate you for it), I do not think it is actually allowed on .au domain — at least auDA has published a policy against it.

Well. Complain has been sent to auDA. Let’s see how fast can they react. By the way, cheers to Vikas for spotting this.