Unasi - the World's Biggest Typosquatter?

Published: 13 October 2007

Unasi is the original alias of an unknown typosquatter who runs what is possibly the largest typosquatting operation in the world.

Unasi's current known aliases are shown below. The number of domains Unasi has registered fluctuates widely. Research conducted by this site revealed that on September 13, 2007, Unasi owned approximately 1.8 million domains. Figures in the table below are from information collected on 10 October 2007¹

Unasi also operates the following Icann-accredited registrars:

Figures valid as of 13 October 2007²

The number of domains owned by Unasi fluctuates dramatically – this is at least partly due to its domain tasting operations. Startlingly, although Unasi dropped almost half of its domain name portfolio in the space of approximately one month, Unasi still owned about 2.7% of all existing registered domain names in the world as of October 1, 2007.

Exploiting the world's Top Brands

On 13 September, 2007, Unasi was hosting all domains on two servers, which made it simple to perform a reverse IP lookup to find all of Unasi’s domains. The reverse IP lookup listed 1,830,010 domains, and a random check proved that all domains were registered to one of Unasi’s current aliases.

Browsing through the list of domain names revealed that many of the domains are not typo domains but simply squatted domains that don't include any trademarks. For instance, the list contained at least 117 domain names that began with the word "senior", such as senior-singles-dating.com and senior-judo.org. Although generic domain names could better be used as websites, there is nothing illegal about squatting on them.

Though nearly impossible to accurately find what percentage of Unasi domains are typos, research was conducted to obtain an understanding as to what extent trademarks were being exploited by Unasi in general. Using a “Top Brands of 2006” list published by Business Week³, Unasi's domains were searched for typo domains (typo domains include domains that contained the trademark as part of the domain). The search included every brand in the top 20 more than 4 characters in length, plus a random search of 5 of the remaining top 100. The results are shown in the following table:

*# of typos indicates that Unasi has at least that number of typos. The search algorithm used was not programmed to catch every possible typo of the particular brand.

Although many strong brands try hard to protect themselves from typosquatters, Unasi still has managed to continue to keep typo domains of the 20 top brands. In addition, our random selection indicates that Unasi has a solid collection of typo domains for virtually every famous brand.

Example Unasi site: sstarbucks.com

But what about domain names in general? For this, a random selection of 25 domain names was taken of the 200-500 most popular Internet websites⁴. The results, shown in the following table, show that Unasi owns typo domains of every single English-language site in the survey, with only 2 Chinese sites and 1 Russian site coming up empty in our search results.

¹The number of domains registered on 10 October 2007, according to www.domaintools.com
²Domain numbers and percentages according to www.webhosting.info
³BusinessWeek, 100 Top Brands of 2006, http://bwnt.businessweek.com/brand/2006
⁴According to alexa.com as ranked on 20 Sep. 2007