Main Street Mason City booted from own website

MASON CITY – An agency that helps promote Mason City’s downtown lost its website address and was forced to re-group elsewhere in cyberspace.

According to a social media post, Main Street Mason City says the former home to its website, mainstreetmasoncity.org, “has been hijacked” and “we are NOT receiving any email sent to it”.

A typical way for any entity to “lose” its website or have it “hijacked” is simply to neglect to renew the domain name, which merely costs a small fee at a domain registrar. Nefarious or simply spry characters seize on that opportunity to grab a good domain name, and then post their own website there. The new owner of the website address then capitalizes on search engine rankings and traffic to the site with their own site. While not technically illegal, some might consider this tactic rude at best, and definitely harmful to the previous owner of the domain name, especially if they were using the site regularly.

In this case, with mainstreetmasonity.org, “the responsible party has put up a phony website, complete with a bit of local news,” Main Street Mason City explained, “which is undoubtedly full of info-stealing viruses. We’re taking legal and technical steps.”

The new owner of the .org address is listed as Lourdes Boucher of 1099 Hinkle Lake Road, Waltham, Massachusetts.  Attempts to communicate with him have failed so far.

Main Street was forced to regroup at a new website address, mainstreetmasoncity.com, and implored visitors to visit the new site and stay away from the old site.

Main Street Mason City is a volunteer based organization that works with downtown businesses to ensure a strong and healthy community core. Tanner O’Brien is the Executive Director and TJ Just is the President of the agency.