More Political Campaigns Play Games with Websites

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Perhaps taking the lead from Connecticut Republicans who set up fake Twitter accounts and websites for their Democratic opponents, other political campaigns are doing it, too.

In California, an intern for the campaign of Beth Krom for Congress noticed that the website of incumbent Representative John Campbell had a misspelled link: , with a missing s. "Krom's supporters bought the misspelled domain name and redirected it to Krom's website," explained NBC News.

Moreover, the link was unnoticed from mid-November until just the other day, when the OC Register's blog pointed it out.

On the other hand, Republican Rita Meyer, candidate for Governor in Wyoming, cut ties with a volunteer staffer who had performed a similar trick, according to the . Opponent Matt Mead had the website meadforgovernor.com, and Meyer staffer Paul Montoya reportedly registered the URL and redirected it to Meyer's site.

According to the AP, Mead learned about it from supporters and confronted Meyer, who said she didn't know about it and wouldn't have done it because it would reflect badly on her campaign. The site was switched back to the legitimate Mead site on Wednesday.

Montoya, for his part, reportedly claimed it was meant to demonstrate the importance of securing pertinent domain names.

Dani AI

Generated

The examples above illustrate two common, low-cost tactics: registering obvious typosquatting domains and creating impersonating social accounts. As noted, opponents sometimes exploit simple human mistakes; as observed, social networks are an easy vector. Those moves can win short-term attention, but they carry legal and reputational risk and are easily defended against.

A practical defensive checklist for campaigns and organizations:

  • Register your primary domain plus obvious misspellings, common TLDs, and common abbreviations.
  • Reserve matching social handles on major platforms and a couple of close variants.
  • Enable registrar lock, set long auto-renew periods, and keep contact/ownership info current.
  • Point typo domains to a clear, non-deceptive landing page or to your main site with HTTPS (avoid trick redirects).
  • Use domain-monitoring/brand-watch services and set up Google Alerts for your name and likely misspellings.
  • Maintain basic trademark records if possible and archive any evidence (screenshots, headers, WHOIS records) when abuse appears.

If you find a bad actor redirecting or impersonating, document everything and then escalate: contact the registrar/host, file platform impersonation/abuse reports, and consider trademark or UDRP routes if ownership disputes arise. Consult counsel before sending aggressive legal notices—proportional, factual responses reduce the chance of backlash.

Finally, think long term: proactive brand hygiene and transparent communication are more effective than retaliatory stunts. Short-term gains from deceptive redirects can become lasting PR problems.

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In politics, anything will be used and using social networking is no exception.

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