Reverse Typo Squatting 101

This morning I received an urgent message from someone highly placed in the large government organisation that I work for.

Apparently, we used to have a 1-800-x number connected to a very popular, publicly available data product. This number was prominently located on the data product's web pages. However, times have changed and phones are not really the default mode of business for the product any more. Thus, that phone number has been defunct (no ringy!) for several years, but many pages have not been updated.

This 1-800-x number has been purchased and activated by an adult services company. This is not related in anyway at all to the product our agency was providing.

Removing all traces of it from *.gov webpages is now a national priority.