Harris’ selection as vice presidential candidate is good news for those who own the rights to HarrisWalz.com
Jeremy Green Etche was in the middle of dressing his young child when news broke that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris had chosen Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate.
And he was excited.
Etche took a special interest in Harris’ selection. He currently owns the rights to HarrisWalz.com, which he bought along with Harris’ other sites in 2020, when Harris was in the midst of a presidential primary race for her running mate. Four years later, with a running mate selected, Etche is willing to sell Harris’ sites, including the one featuring Walz, for $15,000.
“I had four news sites constantly refreshing on my phone,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “I was so excited.” He said he “almost immediately” got calls from both journalists and “friends I hadn’t heard from in a while.”
This isn’t a new scenario for the 36-year-old trademark lawyer from Brooklyn, New York. Etche is a cybersquatter, someone who buys domains with other people’s names or brands on them for very cheap, then hopes to sell them to that person or brand months or years later for a big profit. In 2011, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton looked like a likely candidate to be the 2016 Democratic nominee, then-Jeremy Peter Green (who went by his wife’s last name) purchased ClintonKaine.com.
After the former Secretary of State elected Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, the squatter offered the land to the campaign for a large sum in return. When the campaign declined, he sold it for $15,000 to a digital marketing company that was the Trump campaign. Its website, with “Funded by the Donald J. Trump Campaign Inc.” emblazoned across the bottom, peddled anti-Clinton news.
Etche supported Clinton in 2016 and is backing Harris now, but the possibility of something similar happening again isn’t holding him back.
“The Harris campaign has hundreds of millions of dollars, so if they don’t buy their own domain, that’s on them,” he said Monday, though he’s not convinced they will.
“I don’t want to be too confident that someone is going to reach out,” he said after Walz was elected, “and I think there’s a 75 percent chance that one of the campaign groups or PACs is going to buy from me.”
