The Financial Times reports that, according to domain-registry records, brand protection firm MarkMonitor has been busy registering domain names such as blackstonesucks.com and schwarzmansucks.com (Steve Schwartzman is the CEO of Blackstone).
Firms that are at the center of any form of controversy or, face possible public ire, often protect themselves in this way.
Bank of America took similar action late last year, registering a number of domain names like BrianMoynihanBlows.com and BrianMoynihanSucks.com (Moynihan is BofA's CEO).
The firm that has 'suffered' the most from all this, of course, is Goldman Sachs. A few years back a rather miffed client set up the original goldmansucks.com, but agreed to take it down after resolving his issues with the firm. Then the Wall Street firm went to arbitration to get Dutch entrepreneur Rob Muller to take down goldmansex.com, which was a global directory for adult entertainment.
Muller claimed that 'Goldman' was his nickname, and that he hadn't even heard of the firm before all the fuss started over the name of his business. He subsequently changed the domain to goldmensex.com, but that had to come down too.
Then the firm was faced with goldmansachs666.com, which it has thus far been unable to derail. The site claims to 'provide information about Goldman Sachs to demonstrate how destructive they are to our lives'.
Finally, Fins.com reports that former employees of MF Global in Chicago had a post-Christmas party / wake at the end of last month, and made themselves feel better by 'smashing a star-shaped pinata with pictures of (former firm CEO Jon) Corzine taped on it'. And what was in the pinata ? No, not $1.2bn, but 'slips of paper with 'IOU' written on them!'.
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