Thanks to our own me101 for finding out this news, since he couldn"t post it himself because of work.
Ben Edelman just wanted to find a good bicycle repair shop nearby. Instead, he stumbled onto one of the biggest schemes on the Internet for generating traffic to pornography sites.
According to Edelman, a senior at Harvard College, 4,525 Internet domains currently funnel unsuspecting visitors to an adult entertainment site called Tina"s Free Live Webcam.
Edelman, a technology analyst at Harvard"s Berkman Center, compiled the list this week after his innocent Web search for a bike fix-it shop in Boston landed him in the Internet"s red light district.
After clicking on what he thought was a Web link to Bicycle Bill"s in Allston, Ma., Edelman found himself brusquely shunted instead to Tinawebcam.com.
Bicycle Bill"s owner Paul Sager said today that Edelman is just the latest of numerous Web surfers who have been misdirected by the operators of Tina"s Webcam.
"It"s a wicked scam. All I can do is apologize to people and try to explain that it"s not my fault," said Sager.
According to Sager, someone snatched away his domain, Bicyclebills.com, last year when he failed to renew the registration in time.
Domain registration records show that Sager"s Internet address is now owned by Domain Strategy Inc. of Montreal.
The Bicyclebills.com site is one of thousands apparently registered by Domain Strategy in recent months and configured to re-direct Web surfers to the Tina site using an "URL forwarding" service from Namezero.com of Los Gatos, Calif.
After analyzing the master database of domain name records, known as the "zone" files, Edelman has compiled an annotated list of the sites snapped up by Domain Strategy as part of its dubious marketing strategy.