Famous Four Media announced that its dot .Loan gTLD recently crossed the 1.5 million domain registration milestone.
FFM said in a press release:
“Famous Four Media, one of the world’s leading domain registry operators, is delighted to announce that its dot LOAN gTLD has surpassed 1,500,000 registrations! This represents another extraordinary milestone. Famous Four Media now has two registries with over 1,200,000 registrations under our management.”
Current registration numbers provided by ntldstats, show more than 1.6 million .Loan domains in existence. For a domain aimed at financial service providers, the number sounds incredibly large.
Are there really that many loan providers eager to register a dot .loan domain?
Further analysis by ntldstats shows that the biggest domain registrar for dot .loan domains is Alibaba Cloud Computing in China, with more than 1.3 million domains – that’s 81% of the total dot .loan domains registered.
Dot .loan is now the #4 most populous new gTLD according to ntldstats, pushing down .top, .win and .club.
This apparent anomaly indicates that a major promotion targeted the Chinese market; further research referenced promos for 4 yuan in China, the equivalent of 58 cents per .loan domain.
We looked up the existence of dot .loan domains in Google, and while some .loan domains resolve as forwarders to .com, there are numerous destinations that are unreachable or ride on complex subdomains, indicating excessive use in populating Google with unrelated results – aka index spamming.
One particular email address, vpp668@gmail.com, is linked to more than 5,800 dot .loan domains, that contain numbers or number combinations considered “lucky” by the Chinese; a sample can be seen below:
4a88.loan
4h688.loan
4o88.loan
500wan188.loan
500wan988.loan
500wancaipiao2.loan
500wancaipiao3.loan
500wancaipiao4.loan
500wancaipiao6.loan
50688.loan
50888.loan
531888.loan
533888.loan
74688.loan
74888.loan
748888.loan
776888.loan
783888.loan
7c688.loan
7hao288.loan
7hao388.loan
7j88.loan
7k688.loan
7l88.loan
7p688.loan
7r688.loan
7y88.loan
803888.loan
80688.loan
86l88.loan
These domains, registered in mid November of last year, forward to a landing page referencing CH888.com, an indication that they are used for some purpose other that what the .loan Registry intended:
“The value of .LOAN generic TLD (Top Level Domain) name to lenders is undeniable, and .LOAN generic TLD (Top Level Domain) will be the first choice TLD domain name for stakeholders who have, or expect to have, online loan-related interactions now and in the future. Potential .LOAN generic TLD (Top Level Domain) owners include retail, commercial and private banks and building societies and mutual investment companies, personal finance and specialist lenders such as mortgage lenders, refinance specialists and payday loan companies. Owning a .LOAN generic TLD (Top Level Domain) name, will differentiate your business, drive website traffic and improve your online presence. “
Confused? So are we!
Try to understand Chinese, and their domain market…
.Loan – it costs only 58 cents to enter the scam.