Confusing Fraudulent Sites, Addresses with Political Content

President Joe Biden’s camp launched an official website after he announced his bid to run for reelection next year. The site’s address is joebiden.com, using one spelling of his full name. At first, I headed to a search engine to check the contents of the site, but I absentmindedly entered biden.com, without using his full name.

I was then surprised when a webpage for an organization that does research and patient support for Alzheimer’s disease appeared. The site was soliciting donations. I could not conclude from the page on the screen whether the organization was real, but it certainly was likely that it was using the address to incite people to click on it due to its similarity with Biden’s official site’s address, with no real relationship to Biden’s site. It seemed to be trickery based on people’s concerns that the 80-year-old Biden’s cognitive abilities are declining. The situation is very complicated.

In another incident like this, when the scandal of former President Bill Clinton’s affair came to light in 1998, users were forcibly transferred to an adult site when they entered a certain web address similar to that of the White House’s official website.

Using misleading web addresses for fraudulent purposes such as making money is an old trick. The fact that these sites are tied up with political content seems to be typical of the U.S.