Cybersquatting controversy hits Indonesia and Traveloka

It’s not just the Philippine e-commerce industry that’s being rocked by a cybersquatting controversy. We’ve been told that Indonesia’s flight search engine Traveloka ¹ has similarly been punked by a cybersquatter that’s tricking people into visiting porn sites.

Traveloka co-founder Ferry Unardi reveals that someone bought a number of Traveloka-related domain names and linked them to a local porn site called Krucil ². If you try accessing a number of wrong Traveloka URLs like Traveloka.mobi, Traveloka.biz, Traveloka.asia, Traveloka.co, Traveloka.net, and many more, you will be redirected to Krucil instead.

Damaging brand names

Ferry explains that although they have registered the trademark name “Traveloka”, they can’t do anything because the domain squatters have their details privacy-protected. There’s no way for them to know who exactly is behind this. It might not be Krucil itself.

Whoever is behind this, Ferry says, “Suffice to say that it is the work of somebody or some company who clearly benefits from having Traveloka.com’s reputation affected from being associated with a porn site.” The team believes that the domain squat incident started happening in June, but they only became aware of it three months later.

It is quite surprising that this unethical practice happens in the first place. It’s likely that other startups and e-stores in Indonesia have experienced this as well. Krucil seems to be quite popular too, sitting at 286th position in Alexa’s web rankings for Indonesia.

We have reached out to Krucil regarding this matter, and will update if we hear back from them.

Before this, Indonesia’s biggest forum site Kaskus also had its domain name “Kaskus.us” squatted by someone else. It didn’t redirect people to porn-related sites though.

Traveloka itself is doing well right now. The company handles 200,000 flight searches on a daily basis and was recently invested in by Global Founders Capital.

(Editing by Steven Millward)