Anti-Abortion Group Uses Cybersquatting Tactics To Divert Traffic From Family Planning Clinic

Cybersquatters seek to divert traffic for a variety of reasons.  Many of them are simply looking to divert traffic from a trademark holder to their own website to generate Adlinks and PPC (pay-per-click) revenue.  Companies sometimes register domains of their competitors in order to divert traffic.  In the case below, an anti-abortion group used cybersquatting tactics to try and divert women searching for a family planning clinic known as fphs.org.  When their cybersquatting tactics were discovered, they ultimately took the web page down.  The Whois information for fphs.com is found here.  The registrant is listed as Janna Janke, who apparently is the executive director of Hope Pregnancy Resource Center in Wausau, Wisconsin.

The Crisis Pregnancy Center apparently has a business model designed around deceiving pregnant women, and especially teens, into its website and various locations thinking that they will receive family planning help, but instead receive anti-abortion information.   

Below The Waist Blog:  Thanks to solid local reporting, a Crisis Pregnancy Center website designed to deceive women who were looking for information about reproductive health services was taken down this week. Website visitors who typed in “fphs.com” instead of “fphs.org” were sent to a crisis pregnancy center site instead of to the family planning clinic site they were looking for. Pat Peckham, a reporter with Wausau, Wisconsin’s weekly newspaper, City Pages, discovered the alternate site and pursued the story to its end. In this case, the end was that Hope Crisis Pregnancy Center took the website down because others might see their deceit as ‘untoward.’ Others might see it for exactly what it was.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers often set up “look alike clinics” near abortion clinics in an effort to lure women into their pseudo-clinics. There are many descriptions this month of these kinds of tactics on www.RHRealitycheck.org. Coincidentally, a couple of weeks ago I received an email from a friend in the community. He told me that the daughter of one of their employees had gone to one of our family planning clinics. The staff prayed with her for an hour, convinced her that she was a sinner, gave her a Bible and sent her home.

It is always interesting to see a case involving real world companies and organizations who engage in cybersquatting outside the traditional PPC parking page revenue model.  These are always the clearest examples of bad faith cybersquatting, which would no doubt lead to penalty damages of up to $100,000.00 and attorneys' fees if litigated under the ACPA.