BlackRock is seeking to crack down on 44 copycat websites, some of which are related to cryptocurrencies Cryptocurrency scrgruppen

Investment giant BlackRock has called for tough action against a range of potentially fraudulent domains and websites that it claims are exploiting its name.

On October 10, BlackRock foot Legal complaint in the United States District Court for Easter County, Virginia against the owners of 44 Internet domain names containing keywords such as “Blackrock,” “Aladdin,” “capital,” “crypto,” and “investments.”

The asset manager alleges that the domains were registered in bad faith to take advantage of consumer confusion and divert traffic through tactics such as pay-per-click advertising, malware, and email phishing attacks.

The company’s lawyers from Wiley Rein LLP cited studies that “showed that more than 95% of the 500 most popular websites on the Internet are subject to ‘type plagiarism’.” This is a practice where a domain is registered that represents a typo for the legitimate site.

BlackRock alleges that the entities violated the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act by registering domains that were confusingly similar to their own.

There were a number of cryptocurrency-related domain names, such as blackrock-crypto dot net which failed to open, and crypto-blackrock dot com which offers web design services.

However, most of the ones Cointelegraph tested were not opened or were typical domain name hacking.

BlackRock searched publicly available domain registration data from the Whois database in an attempt to identify the owners.

It seeks to transfer the infringing domains under its control and recover damages and injunctions against further cybersquatting and infringement of its BLACKROCK, ALADDIN and BLK trademarks by the defendants.

Related: California regulator warns of 17 cryptocurrency websites suspected of fraud

Fake domain names are often used in conjunction with ad providers like Google and Facebook to promote scams or spread malware.

Earlier this year, Cointelegraph reported that victims lost more than $4 million to fake websites promoted using Google ads.

Magazine: Should we ban ransomware payments? It’s an attractive but dangerous idea