Squatters

Some time ago I wrote a post in this space about the practice of “typo squatting” – registering an Internet address that was one character off from a heavily-trafficked site in the hopes of catching large numbers of visitors who had typed the real address incorrectly. Probably the most famous (or infamous) case of this scheme was the site called Whitehouse.com – the actual site for the White House is Whitehouse.gov – which exposed huge numbers of otherwise innocent Surfers to hardcore porn advertising until it became an Internet legend. Most of these scams are at worst an annoying reminder to be careful about what you type – especially in a business context or while on the Internet – but there was a story about one example this week that was so egregious I felt that it bears repeating…

You can pick up the story off of the Consumerist web site (including the links to local television stations that have been reporting on this) if you want to, but the basic idea is that students attempting to reach the Federal government’s financial aid application at FAFSA.gov are instead ending up at FAFSA.com, the home of a private “service” that will offer to help them fill out their financial aid forms for the price of $80 or so. The site does say that it’s not associated with the U.S. Department of Education, and even offers a link to the free application site, but apparently it is sufficiently confusing to enough people that local television stations are getting complaints about it – and it’s not hard to see why…

Now, I suppose you could argue that if someone can’t tell the difference between a .com site and a .gov site they’re probably not college material in the first place, and the bogus site is actually doing them a favor. But given how bizarre and confusing a great many government and education sites are to begin with, this isn’t really anything more than a (possibly) amusing quip; even if we could accept that such an assessment is true, it’s still not the place of some random joker who runs a website to make it. More to the point, perhaps, such a policy would be outrageously unfair to foreign speakers, non-traditional students, people who can’t afford a computer or don’t have the leisure time to spend hours wandering around on the Internet, or anyone else who isn’t blessed with the wit and ‘net savvy of the people making such cracks. And even if none of these objections applied, there would still be the point that this website is scamming money off of people in return for a service that helps them to apply for FREE government assistance – and interferes with communications between applicants and the real FAFSA program…

I’m not saying that the people running the FAFSA.com site are doing anything criminal – that’s for the appropriate law enforcement and U.S. Attorney’s office to figure out – and I’m not sure there is any way to prevent unscrupulous (or just extremely annoying) people from trying similar “typo-squatting” scams in the future anyway. It is entirely possible that this sort of Internet outrage (criminal or not) is just one of the facts of our new cyber world, like SPAM emails and pop-up ads, and we’re all just going to have to live with it. I’m just suggesting that the next time you visit an unfamiliar website and it starts doing something you weren’t expecting it to do, it might be worth checking the address before you proceed…