Typosquatting domain recovery firm CitizenHawk purchased
CitizenHawk purchased by legal and brand services firm.
Wolters Kluwer Corporate Legal Services (CLS) has purchased CitizenHawk, Inc., a firm that helps firms protect their brands in domain names.
CitizenHawk is primarily a typosquatting recovery firm. It helps firms obtain typos of their domain names, often times ones that are held by cybersquatters.
Although its business model has shifted over the years, it primarily purchases typos with no upfront cost to the brand. It then monetizes the domain names for a couple years, sometimes through an affiliate program, as payment for recovering the domain name.
The firm has come under scrutiny for filing boilerplate UDRP cases with language that clearly didn’t apply to the case at hand. In one such filing, the panelist decided the case was reverse domain name hijacking.
CitizenHawk has expanded its offerings beyond typosquatting in recent years. Typosquatting recovery on its own has a limited business size.
Wolters Kluwer Corporate Legal Services, which states it serves 70% of Fortune 500 firms, will bring CitizenHawk under its Corsearch brand. Corsearch helps firms with trademark and brand clearance.
