Why does ‘HermanCain.co’ redirect to Ron Paul’s site?

Ron Paul
Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Type in “HermanCain.co” and end up at RonPaul2012.com.

In a sly move, someone has snagged up the domain to “HermanCain.co,” an easy-to-make typo for Internet users trying to reach Herman Cain’s own site, and set it to redirect to Paul’s official campaign site. A TPM reader flagged the clever switch after being accidentally switched to Paul’s site himself.

“We have some very dedicated and intelligent supporters,” Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said.

But as it turns out after a little more digging, the move is not the work of the campaign’s famously tech-savvy backers, but an apolitical Internet prankster. Roger Wehbe, a search optimization consultant at Yooter InterActive Marketing in Pennsylvania, told TPM he bought the domain early this year as a joke when Cain was still considered a fringe candidate only to be surprised when his campaign actually took off. He says the domain gets about seven to ten hits an hour, hardly big traffic.

“We were just goofing around,” Wehbe said. “The next thing you know he shot up. We really didn’t want this thing, so we contacted the campaign. We were just going to give it to him, we didn’t any money.”

Wehbe said he never heard back from the Cain camp and added the RonPaul2012 redirect to try and get their attention.

“I thought the redirect would at least incite someone to contact me,” he said. “But I might have to put up a ‘Hey, Herman! Call Me!’ sign on it.”

According to Wehbe, he’s bought up cheap domain names associated with campaigns as a practical joke for the last several election cycles, dating all the way back to 2000. One ‘VoteBush’ site he owned, for example, used to redirect to Hillary Clinton’s website.

Wehbe asked TPM for help reaching out to the Cain campaign. A spokesman for Cain, JD Gordon, did not immediately return a request for comment as to whether the campaign would reclaim the domain name.

Latest Election 2012
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: