Facebook suing Bangladeshi Knock-Off ‘facebook.com.bd’

Social media giant Facebook is preparing to file a lawsuit on November 19, 2020, in a Bangladesh court against Bangladesh Telecommunications Company Limited (BTCL).

This comes after it was found that the company owns a domain called ‘facebook.com.bd’.

Facebook has appointed Supreme Court lawyer Moksadul Islam. He said:

“A Bangladeshi company, A1 Software Limited, had created a local domain called facebook.com.bd and put it up for sale for £45 million.

“We noticed this domain a few years back and have sent them multiple legal notices since then to shut the domain down, but it was not done.

“All ‘.bd’ domains are owned by BTCL. I’m not sure what motivated BTCL to go ahead with this, knowing that Facebook’s name cannot be legally used anywhere else.”

Generally, ‘.bd’ domains are owned by BTCL.

To create a domain with ‘.bd’, an organisation is required to prove its legal existence by putting forward documents that confirm it, such as utility bills.

Mr Islam continued:

“We are working on filing the lawsuit immediately. We will ask for a ban on the operation of the website, as well as £37 million in compensation.”

When contacted, Dr Md Rafiqul Matin, managing director at BTCL, said:

“We are checking the documents but the domain was issued in 2008. We now maintain a digital log book but everything was paper-based back then.

“It was before my tenure, so it’s going to take some time to find the details.

“Back in 2008, Facebook was not that popular in Bangladesh. Probably that’s the reason why this mishap might have happened.”

Facebook Fraudulent Activity

This is not the first time Facebook has been the recipient of fraudulent activity regarding its platform.

There are many phishing scams in action using the Facebook name, they use the right colours, they include links and it looks legitimate.

Except, Facebook refers people to ‘facebook.com’, not ‘facbook.com’ or something of a similar sort.

In this way, criminals try to steal information by tricking unsuspecting people into clicking dodgy links.

Hence, in March 2020 Facebook starting upping the legal pressure of finding and charging these websites on a global scale.

They started by filing a lawsuit against an organisation called ‘Whoisguard’ which has registered various domain names that Facebook claims:

“Aim to deceive people by pretending to be affiliated with Facebook apps.”

As explained by the social networking platform itself:

“We regularly scan for domain names and apps that infringe our trademarks to protect people from abuse.

“We found that Namecheap’s proxy service, Whoisguard, registered or used 45 domain names that impersonated Facebook and our services, such as instagrambusinesshelp.com, facebo0k-login.com and whatsappdownload.site.

“We sent notices to Whoisguard between October 2018 and February 2020, and despite their obligation to provide information about these infringing domain names, they declined to cooperate.”