Posted on May 24, 2007 - by Justin Hartman

The big Cameroon domain conspiracy

People say that this blogosphere is boring and to an extent I agree however I must admit I am finding some serious value in reading all the African blogs on Afrigator. Africa as a continent are really good writers and I particularly love North & West African political blogging views. My eyes have certainly opened to a whole new world.

Tonight on Afrigator I found this article written by Cameroonian blogger Dibussi Tande which highlights the gory details of how Internet Mogul, Kevin Ham, worked with Cameroonian officials to make millions off domain typo-squatting.

You can read the full article here but I have to say I’m amazed at the white-collar crime involved in the Internet domain space.

According to Dibussi the plot was a simple yet effective one:

In layman’s terms, Cameroon Internet authorities were redirecting all misspelled .com addressed (e.g. www.dibussi.cm instead of www.dibussi.com ) to an advert-based website (agoga.com), where they were making millions of dollars in pay-per-click advert revenue (Pay-per-click is an advertising system where advertisers pay an agreed amount for each click delivered to their site).

I, like The Techie, also thought this domain squatting business was a thing of the past but apparently where there is money to be made there will always be someone government who’ll capitalise.

Ham, dubbed The man who owns the Internet, is estimated to be worth in excess of $300 million and his Cameroonian counter-parts are alleged to have received up to $3 million for their part in the conspiracy.