Hey all, good news!
In December last year we blogged that “mininova” turned out to be the 9th most Googled word. We wrote back then:
It’s good to see our site between the top-10 most popular search terms, but it probably also means the homepage of Mininova is not very trivial to find. We promise you we’re going to work on this issue next year!
One of the main reasons that so many people search on Google for Mininova, is that we use the “.org” TLD instead of the (more common) “.com”. So why not simply register Mininova.com?
The problem was that this domain was already registered by a scammer. This person was using the domain to trick people into paying money (up to 100$) to access our website. This technique is usually refered to as phishing. As a result, we received hundreds of emails from people who submitted their credit card information to this scammer.
Fortunately that’s all over now. In January, we hired the law firm Traverse Legal and started a domain dispute against “Atlas Protecta Co. Ltd.”, which is an alias used by the scammer. The decision came out a few days ago, and can be read here.
The arbiter judged that our three assertions were valid:
- The domain name registered by Respondent is identical or confusingly similar to a trademark or service mark in which Complainant has rights; and
- Respondent has no rights or legitimate interests in respect of the domain name; and
- The domain name has been registered and is being used in bad faith.
To put a long story short, Mininova.com is now ours and redirects to the “.org” site 
A short note to the people who lost money to the scammer: please contact your local bank and ask for a refund of the credited amount of money.