A heads up about another company impersonating us

[Gary]

I had a call from a customer today saying there was a mistake on our site so i asked him to email me a link so i could correct it.
When i got the link i was shocked to find that it was not our site, but cnc4you who has registered a number of domain names like ours but by dropping one of the P in zapp.
So is this illegal? i know that is he registered the name aple.co.uk he would find himself in quite a bit of hot water.
What do you think? Is this illegal or just immoral?
What do you think i should do?
The irony, is i have passed customers to them when i did not have stock of an item, and i guess that wont be happening again.

so go to zappautomation.com or zappautoamtion.co.uk but miss-spell zapp by dropping a P to see.

[magicniner]

He's having the .co.uk domain forward to his site but his domain and business name is then clearly displayed and it's clearly his site so it's not pretending to be you or your site and it's not your business name so not illegal, it's definitely underhand, immoral and distinctly shitty.

For the .co.uk you can complain to Nominet UK and they will tell you if it's worth going through the appeals process to stop try to him doing this, give them a call as they are super-helpful people and will give you good advice, using something close to your name for the same kind of business sector could infringe Nominet's rules for domain use.

The .com does supress his business name and display the dodgy domain so that's arguably an attempt to impersonate your business but a .com is much more expensive to appeal but again worth investigating.

I can't believe what a complete wanker the guy must be to be doing this!
Regards,
Nick

[Gary]

Thanks for the detailed reply, this is not something i expected to deal with and since finding out have now started the registration process to get zapp Automation a registered trade mark.
I am also sifting though all of the info on nominets site, but i am not a solicitor, so its all dutch to me, but i guess i will need to get a solicitor involved to send them a cease and desist letter.
It also looks like this started in 2012 so they have had the domain for at least four years.

[komatias]

As a company owner, this really does piss me off. Sorry to hear it is happening to you Gary. In reality only a solicitor will be able to advise on the legal aspects, morally I agree it is a very bad way of working. Buying an unused URL is onething but using it to maskarade like it is on the .com url is just effing wrong.

[John S]

Gary, Two can play the same game.

cnc4you.me.uk is available plus a load more

[Gary]

Lol, Not sure that will solve the problem, and would most likely make it worse.

Gary, Two can play the same game.

cnc4you.me.uk is available plus a load more

[Lee Roberts]

.com

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

.co.uk

Error: Could not load cache driver cache!

Something has changed :), looks like hosting support for the domains was dropped in my experience.

The content of 4u's website doesn't match that of zapp's, domain forwarding like this wouldn't have done much in terms of "stealing" traffic, in recent years anyway.

[m_c]

They must already know you've realised, as all I get with the misspelled options are an internal server error, and a cache error.

It's certainly underhand, so they'll now be near the bottom of potential suppliers for me.

[John S]

I can't believe what a complete wanker the guy must be to be doing this!
Regards,
Nick

Pity his dad wasn't ............................

[cropwell]

As far as I am concerned Zap! Kerpow!

It's a case of Gun.... Foot.... Aim.... Fire! IMHO

Robbb

Actually, it's probably just an idea that was never followed through and has been dropped due to an attack of sense.