Simpy Chichimichi

Wow -- I think I just made a serendipitous discovery! Tell your friends who work at Facebook and Amazon... email Bezos...

I wanted to go to Facebook and instead typed faebook.com. Note the missing "c". Guess what's hiding on faebook.com? You'd never guess! Amazon.com! Well, that is what I thought at first. I couldn't believe my eyes! Why would Amazon be playing such a dirty little misspell-a-popular-site-name-and-come-to-us game? A quick WHOIS lookup reveals this is really not Amazon's domain:

Domain Name: FAEBOOK.COM
Registrant [1003228]:
        Moniker Privacy Services
        20 SW 27th Ave.
        Suite 201
        Pompano Beach
        FL
        33069
        US

You can see that for yourself here. Amazon.com's record looks like this:

Registrant:
Amazon.com, Inc
   Legal Dept, P.O. Box 81226
   Seattle, WA 98108-1226
   US
   Domain Name: AMAZON.COM

You can see that for yourself here.

So what's going on here?!? Clearly, some scammer is trying to benefit from Facebook's popularity, people's tendency to make the same mistake I did when I typed Facebook without a "c", and Amazon's affiliate program. This is technically super-easy to do and this particular cheat is simply using HTML frames to accomplish his dirty little goal. He uses a frame that consumes the whole browser window to pull in Amazon's pages and thus appear nearly 100% like a genuine and familiar Amazon.com, the site where we've all shopped a million times and are likely to do so again, especially during this time of the year. I am sure neither Facebook nor Amazon will be pleased to see this. What is more, it looks like this scammer might actually be making decent money from this trick, or at least that's what Compete's numbers point to:

Well, maybe not a lot of money is actually being made there. Compete shows a very low number of pages viewed per visit, which tells us people leave the site very quickly. This makes sense - you don't expect to see Amazon's site if you were trying to go to Facebook. Thus, most people probably mumble WTF, re-type Facebook.com correctly, and leave Faebook.com behind.