Spy vs. Spy: Hudson Valley app-maker accuses rival of cybersquatting

Spy Phone Labs claims that a Cyprus spyware company is cybersquatting ”“ diverting customers to a stalking app by illegally mimicking the Middletown company”™s internet domain name.

Spy Phone sued Monapp Calabs Ltd. of Cyprus and owner Andrei Ciuca of Romania in a Dec. 29 complaint filed in U.S. District Court, White Plains.

Cybersquatting is the practice of creating and trading on a domain name that is confusingly similar to another domain name.

Spy Phone owner Dan Parisi is familiar with the practice of capitalizing on a well-known name. In 1997 he acquired the rights to whitehouse.com and converted it to a porn website, according to news accounts.

Parisi”™s Spy Phone Labs owns the trademark to the phrase Spy Phone, as used for computer software for mobile phones. Spy Phone distributes a free monitoring app that it markets as a tool for parents and guardians to monitor their children”™s locations and activities.

The app is downloaded to the child”™s mobile device where an icon alerts the child that GPS locations, contact lists, names of other apps and other data are being transferred to a secure server.

Spy Phone makes money from advertising on the website that stores and displays the data that parents and guardians monitor.

Monapp offers a similar app, according to the complaint, but it does not alert the device owner that data is being monitored. It also enables remote activation of the camera and microphone without the user”™s knowledge.

“These apps,” the complaint states, “are commonly known as spyware or stalking apps.”

Spy Phone began offering its monitoring app in mid-2012, according to the complaint. A few months later, Ciuca allegedly registered spy-phone-app.com.

In 2019, Internet Source Communications LLC, a Wayne, New Jersey, company that then owned the Spy Phone trademark and was managed by Parisi, accused Ciuca of trademark infringement.

Ciuca allegedly established a new domain, spappmonitoring.com, and created a link that directed internet traffic from the old website to the new site.

Though Monapp is no longer directly infringing on the Spy Phone trademark, Parisi argues, it still uses the phrase Spy Phone App to promote its product and confuse consumers about the different apps.

Parisi accuses Ciuca and Monapp of trademark infringement, cybersquatting and unfair competition.

He is demanding unspecified damages and he wants to compel his competitors to cancel the domain names and disable the websites that infringe on Spy Phone”™s trademark, or transfer the registrations to Spy Phone.

Manhattan attorney Michael A. Freeman represents Spy Phone.