VENICE, Calif. — An arbitrator yesterday awarded the domain name SnapFuck.me to Snap Inc., the parent company of mobile messaging app Snapchat, in a cybersquatting case.
SnapFuck.me resolves to an adult dating membership site offering and promoting adult-oriented content. Its tagline reads: “Find the hottest Snapchat girls to SnapFuck.”
Snapchat is a mobile messaging application used to share photos, videos, text, and drawings. Messages disappear from the recipient’s device after a few seconds.
Snap Inc., in its pleadings, said that it has a trademark for “Snapchat” that was granted in 2013, and that SnapFuck.me is confusingly similar to its mark.
The domain holder of SnapFuck.me, Peter Vagin of Chubbs Media in Portugal, did not respond to the claims made by Snapchat in the case filed at the Forum, a mediation organization.
SnapFuck.me has operated as an adult site since it was registered in February 2015. The site describes itself as a “a great way to meet interesting people you may never meet in the normal course of your dating life.”
Yesterday, arbitrator Ho Hyun Nahm ruled the squatting domain name was confusingly similar to Snapchat’s trademark, that the domain holder didn’t have any rights to the domain, and that the domain name was registered in bad faith.
The panelist ordered the domain name ShapFuck.me transferred to Snap Inc.