Uffizi Gallery - non-ufficial sites
 

This has just popped up in La Repubblica a leading Italian newspaper albeit somewhat behind the times (no pun intended!).

A US registered company called BoxNic set up a number of domains such as uffizi.com, uffizi.net, uffizigallery.com, uffizigallery.org and so on to lure people to book visits through them at higher prices than was available through the official site which is https://www.uffizi.it/en

The company has been obligated to pay $120,000 to the Uffizi.

Generally most Fodorites are careful with whom they deal with and this particular Forum is one of the best in helping each other but one always has to be careful.

In fact, if you searched for "Uffizi", it was very difficult to find the real website. $120,000 isn't a lot considering the profit they would have realized from this scheme. Were they required to take down the bogus sites?

bvlenci - yes but probably they will have set up others and moved the running of everything outside of the US to somewhere with less legal risk

Official website tickets Firenze Musei Uffizi e Accademia

It doesn't help that they used b ticket for the official name.

They should be asking the name register to force the unofficial to give up the names. They should also be harassing google and the other search engines.

Traveller Nick - I understand that the names have been cancelled but the risk is that if these individuals are really sophisticated they will re-invent themselves just as the torrent sites do.

They can but if the obvious names are held by the Uffizi itself most of the damage is limited. Most people on the internet go to the obvious .com address.

But there are other targets in the world other than Uffizi.