.xxx not as safe as they claim it to be?

Internet porn has a bad reputation of being a breeding ground for viruses and other insecurities. Next to a couple of other goals (like differentiating porn content from other content), the .xxx-registry “ICM” wanted to create a safe place on the internet that offered porn. A place where you wouldn’t need to worry about your credit card information to be stolen or your computer to be infected by a virus. One of their efforts to achieve this was a deal with McAfee which would scan every single .xxx website on a daily basis for viruses and other security problems. Even before the official start of .xxx, it looks like ICM will not be able to create such a safe place.

A couple of partners of ICM, the so called “founders”, were able to already safeguard and activate their own .xxx domain name before the official lounge. One of them is iFriends.com, now also known as iFriends.xxx. ICM even went as far as running a joined advertising campaign with them including a billboard advertisement on the famous Times Square in New York. The iFriends website is however one known for scamming visitors in high credit card payments without their knowledge. Consumer websites like RipOffReport.com and ScamInformer have hundreds of complaints from people who’s credit card was abused when visiting iFriends. And this probably is only the tip of the iceberg as it’s safe to assume that lots of visitors of a site like iFriends won’t be happy to come out for the fact that they visited (and were scammed by) such a website.

It looks like Google still does trust .xxx. The few websites that have launched under .xxx already rank higher than the .com website of which most are a simple spin-off. If you search for “iFriends in Google, most often (but not alway) iFriends.xxx will be the top result. While the .com-version of this website has been around for much longer. Question is if Google will keep their trust in .xxx.