Fake adult toy store using URL of former Hampton library website
Be careful where you search for books in Hampton — the public library’s former website now redirects to a nonexistent store promoting adult toys and sex dolls.
The URL www.hamptonpubliclibrary.org will take you to a website for the “Hampton Adult Toy Store” with pictures of various sex toys and massage devices, and several blog posts about their use.
Hampton is trying to address the awkward situation.
Old library cards include the URL of the former website. The Hampton Public Library’s main phone number, listed on the actual website, www.hampton.gov/100/Libraries, also redirected callers to the old website as of Wednesday morning.
“Basically, all we know at this point is that someone took the site out from under us,” city spokesperson Robin McCormick said.
A person with a Gmail address, not a Hampton.gov email account, was able to convince the company that controls the site’s registration that they were a city employee, according to McCormick. This person, whom the city has been unable to identify or contact, apparently paid the registration fee and was able to redirect the URL away from the library’s current site to the adult store’s page.
This individual has not attempted to sell the URL back to the city, which common in instances of “domain squatting,” the practice of preemptively buying a generic URL in order to sell it to someone at a profit.
McCormick said the city first learned of the issue Tuesday from a TV reporter, and officials mounted an “immediate offensive.” WAVY-TV first reported the website issue.
McCormick said Wednesday she was unaware the city’s voicemail was redirecting callers to the .org site, and had not received any complaints from local residents prior to being contacted by a TV reporter.
The site does not appear to actually sell anything, and a Google search for the “Hampton Adult Toy Store” and a search of the Virginia Secretary of State website did not turn up any results. What looks like a clickable banner ad for a line of toys called “Fifty Shades Freed” — the same title as a film in the popular “Fifty Shades of Grey” series — is just a picture, and no prices are listed.
The domain name appears to have been registered through NameSilo, a site that touts itself as providing the “lowest prices” for domain names on the internet. A member of the NameSilo Support Team said the domain entered their registrar in July 2021 — which corresponds with when the first blog posts on the site were made — and explained that what most likely happened is the city didn’t renew its lease of the domain.
“No party owns a domain name. The domain is leased until it is not paid for. Then it is released to the public and can be purchased by anyone,” the NameSilo representative said in an email. “An entity not renewing a domain and it getting purchased by another person/company is not a crime.”
NameSilo has ways to report abuse of a domain, including emailing abuse@namesilo.com.
Now, the city is urging library card holders to come to the library for a sticker with the updated URL to cover the old one.
McCormick has provided information about the situation to the city attorney, and the company that handle’s the city’s websites said they would notify city staff if the URL were to become available again. She said the company told the city that the site is now registered in Canada, which “adds a little bit of a wrinkle” to the situation.
The city began redirecting visitors from the .org site to the new site about 10 years ago, McCormick recalled.
“There were departments that were ancillary to the city that had previously used sites, and they kept those registered and just redirected them (to the new sites),” she said.
Attempts to reach the person who runs the .org library page were unsuccessful. The contact email listed on the site does not work and information about who the site is registered to was redacted from an online domain registry database.
Gavin Stone, 757-712-4806 gavin.stone@virginimedia.com
