I know for a fact eat24 did this, and a crappy looking website called Beyond Menu. I'm not sure if GrubHub did this (before the merger). A lot of the times the goals of these sites were to make it look like you were ordering from the restaurant directly, so it was a bit obscured. Order Ahead did this, but only because frankly everyone else was doing it (they definitely didn't spearhead it as a relatively late entrant into the space).
Definitely seems like customer deception, and potential misuse/theft of a trademark.
I am generally skeptical of class-actions, but this seems like a legitimate subject for a (well-run) class-action lawsuit for the benefit of parties who were actually wronged.
Sure, but these things don't really get enforced. I mean, one of my current competitors advertises their product as made in USA (which it is not), but only if you use their chat widget to talk to them (which most customers do) in a move I assume is to remove any paper trail. There is no real clear path except maybe ones that involve either bribing a politician or a lobbyist (which may be the same thing) to get this pursued.
In the Nederlands multiple companies have bocome very big by using this trick. Some companies where doing this for some simple SEO improvements. The first site that used this trick to my knowledge was a website called CoolBlue 4 to 5 years ago (a Amazon like that only sells tech) For every category on there site they would claim a new domain name. So they would have ssdstore.nl monotorcenter.nl etc... once this happend many other sites followed. but this time the evil route.
A dutch Uber eats like company called "Thuisbezorged" made there signup price really cheap. like 2% of a restaurants income they made on the site was payed for using the platform. you get a personal website with a menu but after a while they started to push this really hard, buying automated domain names that roughly look like the name. And they started to spend google adsence for you sometimes without your knowing. restaurants now pay 30% of what they earn on the website to the platform and there are special rules that prohibit them from doing special offers to lure people to there own site.
So it sound like this stuff has already bean going on in the past 5 years, atleast here in the Netherlands it has.
It sure feels like it. I don't know whether it's legally fraud, but it feels very icky. I wonder how the product managers and engineers behind this justify it to themselves.
