Cybersquatting is the fact of registering or purchasing and using a domain name with bad-faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else.

With famous names, cybersquatters can get tons of traffic and generally significant revenues. But not for long, and they can also get into serious trouble. Firstly, when the violation of the trademark is obvious and visible, the owner of the brand will ask the ICANN to transfer to them the domain and will relatively rapidly obtain this. Although there's a $1500 minimum fee for this service (+ lawyers fees), trademark owners will never trind to find an arrangement with cybersquatters. Such solution would certainly be more rapid and less expensive, but it is simply not acceptable for any serious brand. Worse, when the cybersquatter is identified, he or she is most often heavily prosecuted, unless he or she resides in a country where cybersquatting law do not exist or are not enforced.

Just like spammers, cybersquatters will also find it difficult to do anything else on the web because they are rapidly identified (the internet is a small world :-)) and will not be trusted by their peers.

On the contrary to what is often thaught, hijacking traffic is not cybersquatting. It is in a sense acceptable and it is surely highly profitable.