As a victim of cybersquatting myself at one point, this story really struck a note with me.
Grubhub is a food delivery service which contracts with restaurants to pick up and deliver food to people. It solved the problem that small restaurants had, where they could not afford to hire staff to perform deliveries, if that wasn't the main part of their business. Uber Eats is a competitor to Grubhub.
Anyway, Grubhub only gets a commission if the order is placed through their site or one of their subsidiary company sites. If the customer goes directly to the website of the restaurant and orders from there -- or if the restaurant's site does not have an ordering system -- then Grubhub obviously gets nothing.
Since 2010, Grubhub "solved" this by buying up 34,000 domain names which are identical or similar to those of their partner restaurants. Grubhub then created their own misleading websites for these restaurants, making it seem as if it was the official restaurant for the business, and provided an "order online" mechanism which did it through Grubhub.
In many cases, the restaurant owners claim they were unaware this was done, nor was their permission sought.
Furthermore, often the Grubhub site would "compete" in search results with the actual restaurant website, confusing customers.
Grubhub claimed they had a policy to return these domains to any restaurant that complained, but some restaurant owners claim that Grubhub made it intentionally difficult to get the domains back when they requested it.
Shaaaaaaaaaaady.
https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/g...owners-consent
Even if Grubhub quickly returned the domains when requested, this would still be shitty, because it would essentially be a negative check-off scam. A negative check-off scam is where you rip off a large number of victims, but then quickly undo the scam for anyone who catches it and requests you to fix it. These scams are especially effective because only a small percentage of people catch it, and it also prevents these people from taking further action, once they're made whole.
However, that doesn't even appear to be what's happening here, as Grubhub is alleged to make it difficult to acquire the domains!
I never use Grubhub, I always like to check my food while at the restaurant, and also be able to request the right amount of side stuff (sauces, etc) and make sure I get it. Once a delivery person shows up with your order and something's incorrect, it's a huge pain in the ass. For that reason, I always do pickup and almost never do delivery of any kind.