Are cult apologists buying up domain names on the Internet to mislead the public? - CounterCOG.com, a domain name once devoted to archiving critical information about the so-called Children of God now known as The Family, seems to have been co-opted by cult apologists. It appears this shift of purpose took place about two years... [CultNews.com]

The rest of the story.

countercog.com expired and someone else [a cult apologist?] registered it.

I remember when this happened. Sam had been hosting his CounterCOG newsletters on countercog.officehiway.com. He had been using the name CounterCOG for many years before that. Then at some point, someone helped him register countercog.com and host it somewhere else or set up some type of redirection to his hosting provider at the time. He did not bother to register countercog.net or countercog.org. Someone else (Peter Steiler and Peter Vincent) registered countercog.net and countercog.org and later, countercog.com and pointed all of them to a page on s102.freespace.com.

Sam posted some messages on the exfamily.org GenX board and other places asking for help in and I decided to see what I could find out. At first glance, it appeared to me that all the contact information provided by the registrants of countercog.net/org, except for the email addresses, was invalid. I emailed Sam some "IANAL" worthless free advice about consulting an attorney specializing in such matters (by 2003, there were tons of them), Registrar Terms of Service and the ICANN Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy and arbitrator fees. There was also some trivia like "the Chicago Post Office at 433 West Van Buren is the only postal facility in the world you can drive a car through," one of the phone numbers was once used by the United States Postal Service and Peter Steiler was a character in a Sherlock Holmes story - "The Final Problem" by Arthur Conan Doyle. I even mentioned that "the 312-765 exchange is served by the Wabash (CHCGILWB) Central Office at 520 S. Federal St. in Chicago." In a later email I wrote that I might be wrong about the ICANN UDRP being useful in this matter. Sam emailed me back and among other things wrote that he remembered me from London and included some details of my secret life On Wednesday April 16, 2003 at 1:17pm I wrote: "I think you are confusing me with someone else. My father is Mr. Frouman and perhaps my height is slightly above average, but I've never even visited London or India, had a spouse named Ara and as far as I know, my father had nothing do with FAIR (not sure what organziation you are referring to, I have heard of the group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting at http://www.fair.org/ but I wasn't aware they had anything to do with printing Deborah's book -[I] thought that was Zondervan Publishing). I've heard of S.P. from reading newspaper articles but I don't think I've ever met her. Anyways that is ok as I recall that in our last email exchange several years ago I also confused you with another Sam ([redacted]?) who had emailed me around the same time." Sam emailed me back that he had confused me with someone else who had the same initials. So at this point, there were four Peters somehow involved in the story. I must confess that I found the whole thing rather amusing. I must also confess that, in the back of my mind, there was the thought that perhaps the "hijacking" of CounterCOG's name was some type of payback for the wspubs.org Dead Letter Office fiasco. But then a few days later a highly reliable source posted a message that Sam's domain had expired and that he had let him know about it far in advance. This is nothing at all like what happened to the Cult Awareness Network. Strangely enough, this page at FACTNet.org still has a link to countercog.com. The only one I could find in Google. If I recall correctly, I or someone else tried to bring this to their attention but it was never fixed. Maybe the notice was misdirected. What I really want to know is what happened to countercog.excult.org. It stopped resolving a few weeks ago. However, some of his CounterCOG newsletters can now be found at http://www.xfamily.org/