Armor Bank’s UDRP against the domains ArmorBank.com and ArmorBank.org was met with an unpleasant decision.
Armor Bank is an Arkansas-based state bank that filed the complaint. It is completely owned by Big Creek Bancshares, Inc. (“Big Creek”), an Arkansas corporation and the USPTO registrant of the mark ARMOR BANK.
Meanwhile, the Respondent demonstrated their use of domain names dating back to 2014 with an Archive.org capture offering the.com domain “seeking partnership” since it is a “perfect name for a new financial institution.”
The Complainant registered the name ARMOR BANK in 2018, and in this case, the domains and their use predate the mark. The forum panelist concluded that this is a case of reverse domain name hijacking.
” Big Creek had no established reputation in its then non-existent mark when Respondent registered the armorbank.com domain name. In each of the cases cited by Complainant in support of its contention that using a disputed domain to misrepresent an affiliation with Complainant to attract and confuse Complainant’s customers is “indicative of bad faith registration and use” under Policy ¶ 4(b)(iv), the trademark rights of the complainants arose prior to the registration of the disputed domain names. The Panel considers that Complainant, represented by Counsel, must have known that its Complaint should fail to establish bad faith registration of the armorbank.com domain name.
The armorbank.org domain name was registered after Big Creek registered its mark. It resolves to Respondent’s website at “www.armorbank.com”, which Complainant contends to be use in bad faith. Under these circumstances the Panel is not satisfied that Complainant should have known that its Complaint would fail to establish bad faith registration of the armorbank.org domain name.
The Panel therefore finds that, in relation to the armorbank.com domain name, the Complaint was brought in bad faith and constitutes an abuse of the administrative proceeding. “
Final decision: Deny the transfer of ArmorBank.com and ArmorBank.org, with RDNH found in the ArmorBank.com case.
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