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Papjohns.com redirects to Pizza Hut

5 points by Killah911 ↗ HN
Didn't know if anyone else noticed this, but incorrectly typing in papajohns.com (by typing papjohns.com) redirects to Pizza Hut's online ordering site.

EDIT: This was brought to my attention by my a friend of mine (I didn't believe him at first). The first time I typed it into the browser, sure enough it took me to Pizza Hut's website. The second time, it started showing me a different page. Tried the same thing from an incognito window, and again, saw the same non-sensical squatter looking page. Tried from another device on the same wifi, and no more Pizza Hut page. Then tried from a cellular device on a different network and no longer saw the same page.

Would love to know if anyone else was able to see Pizza Hut page. I didn't think they'd be dumb enough to buy misspellings of papa john's site. But it looks like they're doing something a bit more sophisticated. Would love to know what all this is, if anyone else has an idea on this.

5 comments

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forgotpasswd3x
I just tried it, and it took me to turbotax's website. It redirected me through a couple different pages (I'm pretty sure I saw doubleclick in the address bar temporarily) before settling on turbotax. Subsequent attempts took me to the squatter page.
alazar
On the first hit with a non-curl user agent it will take you through a series of advertisement redirects then land you on an ad page. I got TurboTax, probably because I just read a TurboTax article from Reddit.
logn
I don't think this is a Pizza Hut conspiracy. The IP of that domain also hosts hotmqail.com, runescpe.com and a variety of squatted domains.
Killah911
So, I'm not particularly worried about a Pizza Hut conspiracy. Initially, I thought it would be pretty dumb of pizza but to play a game like this (I can imagine some negative PR at the very least). But was was far more amusing was this while this looked like a case of cyber squatting, it was far more sophisticated and anything I've come across before.

Whoever is running is the show is obviously monetizing these sites is a very interesting way. What I now think is that they may be running some type of Ad Network & I am curious as hell to find out how that business works.

While direct cyber squatting might be hoping that papa johns pays them a lot of money some day. These people might actually be taking advance of people's perceptions and. Creating a business out of it. The level of tracking they're doing means they've got some smart people behind the scenes & I wonder what type of algorithms might be in place deciding which ad to show which person

rajacombinator
Yep it sent me to Pizza Hut too but there were a couple redirects in there. Looks like some shady affiliate bought the domain and sending ppl to Pizza Hut for commissions. Pretty funny IMO!