Tries reverse domain name hijacking — Armor Bank
Bank goes following .com domain registered ahead of it had trademark rights.
A Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) panelist has found that Armor Bank tried reverse hijacking the domain ArmorBank .com.
The Arkansas bank uses the domain name armor.bank.
The firm filed a cybersquatting dispute against ArmorBank .com and the matching .org domain name.
Under UDRP, the Complainant has to show that the domain was originally registered by the registrant in bad faith. In this case, the trademarks the bank presented postdated the registration of armorbank .com. Thus, it would be impossible for the domain to be registered in bad faith to target the bank.
The registrant later registered the matching .org domain name, which it stated it did to protect its rights.
Panelist Alan L. Limbury noted:
Big Creek had no established reputation in its then non-existent mark when Respondent registered the armorbank .com domain name. In each of the cases cited by Complainant in support of its contention that using a disputed domain to misrepresent an affiliation with Complainant to attract and confuse Complainant’s clients is “indicative of bad faith registration and use” under Policy ¶ 4(b)(iv), the trademark rights of the complainants arose prior to the registration of the disputed domain names. The Panel considers that Complainant, represented by Counsel, must have known that its Complaint ought to fail to establish bad faith registration of the domain name.
He denied the bank’s claims, and found reverse domain name hijacking with regards to the .com domain.
Mitchell Williams Selig Gates & Woodyard, PLLC represented the Complainant. The domain owner appears to have been self-represented.
(As a side note, while researching this case, I searched Google for “Armor Bank.” The second result was for armor.onlinebank.com. My first thought was that this was a phishing site. It turns out that it’s a domain used by Fiserv, which provides outsourced services to banks. I would think that using this default domain for online banking would open a bank up to more risk of its clients falling victim to phishing attacks.)
