amaozn.com

This weirded me out yesterday. Shopping for air conditioners, I thought I was at amazon.com. I noticed, though, that amazon did not remember me from earlier that day. Normally I stay logged in at amazon.com. That's when I noticed the URL. I was actually browsing amaozn.com, having mis-typed the URL. Amaozn.com is a copy of amazon.com, as this search result page for air conditioners shows:

http://amaozn.com/s/ref=nb_ss_?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=air+conditioner&x=0&y=0

The WHOIS info for amaozn.com looks a little fishy to me. Amazon.com proper is registered through NetworkSolutions, a typical registrar for larger corporate entities. Amaozn.com is registered through GoDaddy -- not your typical registrar for the likes of Amazon. Additionally, the DNS servers differ between the 2 domains, as does the contact information. Amaozn.com is apparently owned by Amazon Technologies of Reno, Nevada, while Amazon.com is owned by Amazon.com, Inc., in Seattle.

I doubt there is any news in my little discovery, but I am a little surprised. I would expect that Amazon would fully redirect the typo domains it owns to the genuine amazon.com address. I, for one, would not log in or attempt to make purchases through a site that looks like Amazon.com but is not Amazon.com. Additionally, if I was in the business of earning customers' trust I would not expect them to browse around mutant sites which (I assume) require new logins and account settings.

For kicks I looked up amoazn.com and found a more typical typo traffic-leech type of site.

An attempt to access the top page of amoazn.com redirected me to this blank page:

http://66.39.123.200/a5920/

and the top level URL gave me a strange "E-Greetings and more" page filled with links to content from cellularphones.com and johnsonlane.com (the johnsonlane.com content does not work since that site seems to be down).

A lookup of the IP address is in the URL reveals that it is connected to another TYPO site:

$ host 66.39.123.200
200.123.39.66.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer amreicangreetings.com

At this point I looked out the window and decided not to waste my day in this manner any longer.