By Dan Levine
Published 08/16/01 in the Hartford
Advocate (reprinted with permission)
Point your Internet browser to www.whaven.com.
You don't have to blush when you
get there--the town of West
Haven is already more
embarrassed than you.
The website is a porn billboard,
advertising such sexual sundries
as "Facial Sex Shot--Gorgeous bad
girls take huge loads in their
sweet, beautiful faces!!" An array
of banner ads provide quick
access to the gamut of online
voyeuristic pleasures.
That the billboard ended up at West Haven's old web address is no accident. The
town fell victim to one of the newest Internet scams, and town officials are calling it
extortion.
It all started when the town decided to scrap its old website and construct a slicker,
more up-to-date version. The new site, launched four months ago, has a completely
different web address: . No one gave any thought to the old whaven.com address, and
the town allowed its ownership of the domain to lapse. Domains are usually registered
and held for about $35 per year. But as soon as the town's hold over the old address
expired about six weeks ago, the URL became available to anyone on the open market.
In stepped a company called EEEX Hosting, a Burbank, Calif.-based outfit that
maintains a site called . The company purchased whaven.com and posted the porn
links.
Almost immediately, the phone calls started rolling in to West Haven City Hall, says
Alan Olenick, executive assistant to West Haven Mayor Richard Borer Jr. Olenick
says he contacted the state immediately so their links could be directed away from the
porn.
But surfers can still find their way to the whaven.com site, resulting in the town's
continued embarrassment. That's what EEEX Hosting is banking on, says John Gauld,
the town's web strategist. In the middle of the porn links, an icon tells visitors that
they can buy the domain back, but bids of less than $550 will not be accepted.
So the goal is to shame the town to buy back its old domain at a grossly inflated price.
Both Gauld and Olenick say it is pure extortion. EEEX Hosting did not return calls for
comment. "We're contemplating buying it to end this fiasco," Olenick says. "The
continued embarrassment is far worse."
West Haven is not the only entity that's fallen victim to this scam. The Connecticut
Pride, a defunct CBA basketball team, had its old web address snapped up as well.
The site is identical to whaven.com, with the same offer of no less than $550 to buy
the address back. Last week, the state's "You Belong in Connecticut" website quickly
pulled its link to the old Connecticut Pride site when it realized it was a pornography
page.
Gauld surmises that EEEX Hosting has software that flags all web addresses that are
about to expire. The identified sites could be screened to determine which entities
would be most likely to pay inflated prices to buy their address back, Gauld says.
For example, American River College changed its domain name two years ago for its
extension courses. The old name was snapped up and transformed into a pornography
billboard, according to Scripps Howard News Service.
Once a company has registered the domain, it is extremely difficult to take legal action
against them because there is nothing illegal about registering a domain name. Only if
trademark rights are infringed can possible legal action take place.
Even then it could be difficult. Using Network Solution's "Whois" database (which
lists the location of the world's servers), whaven.com is not operated out of a server in
Burbank, even though EEEX Hosting is listed as being based there. The whaven.com
server is located at 19 Bondarenko Square in Obninsk, a city in the Kaluga region of
Russia. That could make it more difficult to sue in American courts, Gauld says.
Perhaps the most effective way of preventing this type of scam is to keep your
domains registered, even if you switch web addresses, Gauld says.