What a difference a hyphen makes.
Internet banking enthusiasts hoping to apply for a mortgage or loan at
www.td-bank.com are being welcomed with a different sort of offering:
Torry, a 20-year-old bisexual who enjoys dancing naked and is turned off
by rude people.
Toronto-Dominion Bank, whose official
online address is www.tdbank.com, was left red-faced yesterday after it
discovered the insertion of an extra keystroke could lead its customers
away from the bank and to an Internet porn site promoting live sex shows.
The site features a number of topless
shots of a reclining Torry, who entices visitors to watch her in action in
a free "Web cam" performance.
Jeff Keay, a spokesman for TD, said the
bank's lawyers will likely demand the Web site's owners stop using the
name.
"We don't want anybody using our
good name for their own nefarious purposes," he said, adding the bank
has yet to contact the operators of the porn address. "We have acted
in the past to prevent people from doing that."
The Web site is registered to Marc
Primeau, a Montreal resident. Mr. Primeau could not be reached for
comment.
Mr. Keay, who could not access the site
because of filters on the bank's Internet server, maintained a sense of
humour about the copycat domain name and drily joked that the situation
could have been worse.
"Well, at least she's 20," he
said.
Whitehouse.com may be the most famous
example of a porn site hijacking a recognizable name in order to drum up
extra traffic.
Although whitehouse.com generated a
torrent of publicity -- and became an instant embarrassment for the U.S.
government, which operates the official www.whitehouse.gov nameplate -- it
continues to peddle porn at the same address.
But corporations tend to be more
aggressive in protecting their turf, and chances are good that TD will be
successful at closing down the td-bank.com address, suggested Michael
Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in Internet
law.
"I think [it] is unquestionably
the case that it's relatively easy for corporations that can prove they
have a trademark in their name to get that domain name transferred where
it's used for a porn site."
Mr. Keay said some companies simply
choose to ignore copycat sites unless they receive a flood of complaints,
and added that the problem has been diminished in recent years because
fewer people tend to type random domain names directly into their
computers.
"When you use [search engines] to
access a company you don't end up at these porn sites masquerading as
legitimate companies anyway." -
Financial
Post
