The other day I came across a very disturbing article that covers a very true dirty underhanded technique some people will go to in order to steal your web business. It reminded me of a real-life story of an acquaintance of mine who had that very same thing happen to her, and of all things by this couple she had thought were her best friends. This person, who I will call Martha, related with great distress to me over the telephone, how when she had encouraged her friends to pursue the same line of Internet business as she was having success in, the last thing that she thought was her so-called friends would set up a website under the same identical name as she had! The worse part was they then began advertising campaigns to appear directly under or next to her web store! If she had only known about this article ahead of time and taken the precautions listed there to heart, she never would have had the terrible grief she’s suffered trying to hold onto her successful Internet business that her ex-friends were, and still are by the way, doing their best to hijack traffic from to themselves, not giving a damn the consequence to her. I learned from that acquaintance that it’s too late after the fact because she did try without success to go through the appropriate domain name authorities to try to fight the obvious theft of her business name, but she encountered no luck, not even using a lawyer, to get her ex-friends to stop using her identical business name and domain name. As you can imagine, this was confusing the hell out of her long-time customers, wondering if that was her website or not. In that same phone conversation she told me how her customers were shopping at the other site and sometimes calling her up to find out the status of their order. It’s an ecommerce store owner’s worse competitor nightmare. So if you have any kind of domain name that means something to you, whether it’s a store or not, you should go check out this domain name registration article warning about this serious problem and how to solve it.