I received an interesting message today, titled Business opportunity for somedomain.eu; and ostensibly sent by someone in Luxembourg. The domain mentioned in the subject (which was not really 'somedomain.eu') is the '.eu' counterpart to a '.com' domain that I own, and the message went as follows:

We are KJ Investments, we have registered the European Union domain name somedomain.eu, which is similar name with your domain. We already have visitors from European Union which are basically interested in what you offer on your website.

We want to make you an offer today.

We come with a proposal to improve your site and your benefits by bringing to you our support of best programmers in the field and a better traffic on your website.

We will ask for a commission from what we offer you and this will be determinate when we will sign a contract.

Our programmers can develop by their own project and you can take full advantage of it, or you can send us the content and we will fill it up.

That will improve your traffic and you will gain the possible clients from the EU also.

Put more simply: Hi. We saw that your domain was getting some attention, so we squatted a similar-sounding domain and now we'd like a piece of your action.

The domain was registered just over a year ago, and the registration information is a patchwork of European TLDs — registrar in Belgium, nameservers in Romania, and the registrant claims to be in the United Kingdom. His name, according to Eurid, is Kurt Janusch.

It turns out that Kurt Janusch has what the Brits call 'form'. A quick search of Google discloses a number of other mentions of similar tactics, including a couple of dispute resolutions that have gone against him. The complainants allege — and it's hard not to agree with them — that he registered the domains in question in bad faith. According to a blog article about Kurt Janusch he has registered some 3000 '.eu' domains. Xtreme Security Systems ('xss.ro', which provides nameservice to Janusch's squatted domains) has registered more than 43,000 '.eu' domains.

That's a lot of domains. If they were all registered during the landrush period for '.eu' names, the registrant paid $12.50 each for them. That's a total investment of close to half a million dollars.

But we already knew that there were serious amounts of money being put into squatting '.eu' domains. When the EU landrush fiasco took place, interested registrars were required to front up EUR10,000 each for their place at the feeding frenzy. A quick skim of the registrar records reveals around 250 that were almost certainly registered by a single organization (the number of registrars registered by that one entity, under a variety of false names but a limited number of addresses, is probably in reality much higher). That suggests that someone was able to put together EUR2.5 million (probably $4.5 million or so) in order to comprehensively squat the '.eu' domain. That's a lot of money to spend on an uncertain return.

The domain that Mr Janusch wants to use to get himself a cut of my business was registered more than a year ago, so it's either just been renewed or will have to be renewed very shortly. So far, he probably hasn't made much money off it — it's been hosting ads for him, but there's no real reason for anyone to visit that domain, unless he can drive traffic to it with blogspam or some similar mechanism. That may explain why he's eager to rope me into some dubious deal by which I agree to give him a slice of my earnings in exchange for all the 'European' traffic he claims to be able to send my way.

The problem for Mr Janusch is that I have absolutely no interest in doing a deal with him. I don't need any help "developing" my site (time, yes, but help, no). And my site seems to be doing quite nicely as it is. Oddly, those possible clients from the EU seem to be coming to my site in large numbers anyway. Apparently no one told them that Europeans are only supposed to go to sites with '.eu' on the end.

As always with spam and other forms of Internet parasitism, I have to wonder who the suckers are who are making this particular scam profitable. For myself, I find it hard to see how it could work. The entity known as Kurt Janusch isn't selling names that are desirable in themselves, like 'money.eu' or 'travel.eu'. He's sending his mails to people who already own a more 'desirable' name (more desirable by virtue of the fact that it's in the '.com' TLD) and trying to persuade them that it's worth handing him a piece of their pie in order to get the use of the '.eu' equivalent. You'd need to be fairly simple-minded to fall for that one.

The other problem for Janusch is that the only entities that really need the '.eu' equivalent of their domain are corporations — who are more than capable of filing a dispute and getting the squatted domain taken away from him. To the rest of us, it's a matter of substantial indifference whether we own the '.eu' domain or not.

I can't help feeling that the squatters didn't really think this one through. But if they lose their money on this ill-planned venture, well, I won't be shedding many tears for them.