Is Barefruit Good For the Internet? Are they using underhand techniques to Hijack traffic?
Who are BareFruit?
Basically they work with tiscali in the UK to manage display of information if your are using a dead link / mistyped link
So what happens if I type in an incorrect domain?
Typically you get a page like the following: (Click to see full image)
BUT the big issue comes in when you make a near miss on the domain for a big company (as pointed out by Keith Budden here).
Using the example of CURRYS.co.uk. If you were to mistype the domain syntax ie www.currys.co.u.k, you will be redirected to currys.co.uk. Which seems OK, until you realise that it redirects through an Affiliate Window affiliate link.
Now affiliates have been prohibited from using domains that use the word currys or contain mispellings of their brands, the following is copied and pasted from Awins T&C
If affiliates wish to direct traffic through to their own site then their domains must not include the word ‘Currys’. This restriction includes mis-spellings of the brand.
Examples: www.currrys.co.uk, www.curryoffers.com, www.curriesfridges.co.uk etc.
So does www.currys.co.u.k (and hundreds of other vairiations) breach Awins t&cs? Yes it does. This leads us to one of two scenarios, Barefruit is breaking these T&C and should be picked up by affiliate window OR there is a ‘brand bidding’ style agreement between awin/currys/barefruit. Which is worse?
The scariest thing is that if you were to type in a subdomain that is not being used by currys followed by the .currys.co.uk you will see that the redirect happens through barefruit. If you type in wwww. or ww. you get a redirect through guess whos affiliate link.
Affiliate window are looking into the matter and I hope to get comment from them soon.
Hey mate,
Did you get a reply from Affiliate Window about this in the end?
Ta,
James
Comment by James | May 12, 2008
Waiting for a reply here
http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/affiliate-marketing-moderators-choice/78042-anyone-heard-barefruit-3.html
blue barracuda have expressed that they do not work with Barefruit
Comment by admin | May 12, 2008
I assume this post will be moderated, so I’ll be blunt. Sorry if i offend, but I’m seriously pist at this.
I hope this jumps up to bite Barefruit right in the stink box and the directors end up in prison for hijacking telecomms, fraud etc. Lets see how clever they are when they’re being reamed out by a 6 foot bank blagger called Louise!
Twastards
Comment by jimbo | May 15, 2008
Tiscali also seem to redirect Google searches to barefruit - an nslookup on google.co.uk gave an IP address, then an nslookup on that IP address resoved to a barefruit.co.uk server.
Google searches were returning a lot of ‘rubbish’ - a search for ‘google spoof’ returned nothing about google spoofs, but returned a list containing references to online dating sites, online gambling sites, ’shopping’ sites etc.
After working out the proper address of google via a public nslookup site, and opening the google search page based on the IP address, searches for ‘google spoof’ returned much more relevant results.
I submitted a support call to Tiscali, and then have now set an opt-out from Barefruit for my account.
I was pretty peeved that my I had to do complain in the first place - anyone would trust an ISP to point google searches to google, and not to redirect searches to a 3rd party to spoof searches, and inject irelevant results into a search query.
Comment by MArk | July 5, 2008