Square off over .Bank domain name — Pioneer Banks

Both banks have a bigger problem than Pioneer.bank.

Two things caught my eye when Pioneer.Bank was hit with a UDRP in January.

First, I’m familiar with the domain owner, Pioneer Bank, which is based in my old hometown of Austin.

Second, I wondered how someone could win a UDRP against a .bank domain name since the registry verifies each registrant’s standing to register the domains.

National Arbitration Forum has published its decision. Unsurprisingly, the complaint failed.

Pioneer Bank in Fresh Mexico filed the dispute against Pioneer Bank in Texas. The latter uses the domain name for its website.

It turns out that the Fresh Mexico bank has a beef with how the Texas bank purchased the domain name in the sunrise period. It believes that the Texas bank did not have a valid trademark that could be used in the Trademark Clearinghouse.

The panel rightfully pointed out that the UDRP is not the proper policy for such a dispute.

The .bank top level domain had a sunrise dispute policy but the deadline for that has passed.

The more significant risk for these two banks is that neither owns PioneerBank .com, which forwards through zero click. When I visited it this morning, it forwarded me to one of those scammy Chrome extension pages (see below). Making it worse: Pioneer Bank in Fresh Mexico uses an absolutely horrible domain name: PioneerBnk.com (note the missing ‘a’). As stated by National Arbitration Forum’s website, an entity filed a UDRP against PioneerBank .com in 2014, but it still shows as pending.