Disney-porn hook-up sends typosquatter to jail

An American man has been found guilty of typosquatting - using names based on popular web searches to trick people into visiting pornographic websites – and sentenced to two and a half years in prison.

John Zuccarini, 56, had registered misspelled versions of Disney trademarks, as well as Harry Potter, boy band the Backstreet Boys and popular US lingerie store Victoria's Secret, to fool web users into visiting sites advertising porn and other goods, from which he earned a lucrative pay-per-click fee for each visitor.

The typosquatting scam saw Zuccarini earning $1m a year, said the government, after taking advantage of  children's tendency to misspell words. The scammer was the first to be convicted under a new law, the Truth in Domain Names Act, which is part of the Amber Alert Act that makes attracting children to pornographic websites a criminal offence.

Zuccarini had been on the run for some time before his eventual arrest and had been sued several time previously for similar scams, after hijacking, among others, Dow Jones' and the US Baseball League's domain names.

This isn't Zuccarini's first brush with the law over his typosquatting. He was charged in 2001 under the US Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act 1999 after registering various misspellings of viral marketing site Joe Cartoon – responsible for 'frog in a blender' – but when Joe Cartoon took legal action, Zuccarini changed his stance, replacing the ad sites with free speech sites and saying it was a protest against 'animal cruelty'.

He also lost out to Oscar winner Kevin Spacey in the same year and in 2002 was found to have registered 5,500 domain names, including over 40 variations on the name Britney Spears, by the Federal Trade Commission. He was fined $1.9m for his scams and banned from internet advertising. He was also fined $500,000 in 2000 after domain-hijacking games retailer Electronics Boutique.

Zuccarini raked in between 10 and 25 cents for each click and boosted his income with a practice known as 'mousetrapping'. Users trying to access the site would be treated to a barrage of pop-up ads and when the web surfer clicked on the ad's close button or tried to go back using their browser, special code would launch even more advertising.

Typosquatting reached its peak in the heady days of the dot-com bubble, with organised criminals and a few get-rich-quick merchants playing on popular brand names and sloppy typing to drive their own traffic. A similar ploy, cybersquatting, was made illegal in Britain after one canny company registered popular brands' domain names, including burgerking.co.uk and marksandspencer.co.uk, and tried to sell them on to the companies in question for an inflated price.