It is increasingly common to find internet domain names that impersonate an individual or company, sometimes for the purpose of committing fraud or extortion, and sometimes for the purpose of diverting web traffic to unrelated advertisements. These scams are rarely pursued by law enforcement, as the perpetrators are frequently in foreign countries where they are difficult to track and even more difficult to apprehend.
Even in these cases, impersonated individuals and companies have a powerful tool for dealing with bogus domain names: the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP). UDRP is a process adopted by all domain name registrars for “generic top-level domains” (such as “.com” and “.net”) to allow private arbitration to suspend or transfer a domain name that was abusively registered. UDRP allows an abusive domain name to be shut down through a private online process without any involvement by law enforcement or national court bureaucracies.
There are six approved arbitration service providers that accept submissions of UDRP complaints; the most popular is the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a United Nations agency headquartered in Switzerland. Assuming a complaint is undisputed (which is usually the case when dealing with outright scammers), it takes about two months to process a complaint through WIPO.
We handle UDRP claims for clients worldwide, and charge a flat fee of $2,900 to prepare, file, and pursue a UDRP complaint before WIPO. $2,000 is fully refunded if the complaint is not successful.