Warning: Your domain is in peril

This may not be an interactive marketer’s worst nightmare, but it’s close. Here’s a scary story about a new form of domain squatting which potentially cripple your marketing efforts. Apparently, a new breed of domain “sniffer” is capable of detecting when you do a WHOIS search to determine whether an URL is available; this allows them to reserve the URL and hold it for ransom, sometimes within minutes.

Aside from being just plain nasty, why is this a big deal?  Well, not only does it block users from launching new products, services or companies with the URL of their choice, it may prevent them from picking the URL which best reflects their sweated-over keyword strategy.  All told, let me say that I officially detest these guys. And you thought domain squatting was so 1995…