warning
PSA: LocalMonero.com has been acquired by a competitor and the competitor is now using it to redirect all traffic to their own site. This is unethical and almost certainly illegal. We've attempted to rectify this situation peacefully but the competitor is refusing to cooperate. Details inside.
by Alex_LocalMoneroLocalMonero Staff
EDIT: We will no longer be replying to this thread, we need to get back to work on the site. Thanks for all the support!
Who are you?
LocalMonero! We've been around for about 3 months and position ourselves to be the Monero equivalent of LocalBitcoins. Many members of the Monero community here on reddit have had experiences with us and so far most people seem to think we're OK.
Can you give me some background on this situation?
LocalMonero is operating from the domain localmonero.co, since we weren't able to acquire the localmonero.com due to being unable to reach the owner of that domain at that time. At that point in time (and even after our August 25 launch) that page had no content, it was parked or squatted by someone.
On August 25th, 2017, LocalMonero officially launched, and this is considered to be the date of establishment in commercial use, protecting our trademark in common law jurisdictions.
On September 5th, 2017 (10 days after our launch), we've noticed that localmonero.com now put up an pre-announcement page, inviting people to leave their email to be notified on localmonero.com's launch. Here's that page archived.
Obviously, we got worried, and so we immediately also applied for an EU trademark just in case (since EU isn't common law, and in EU trademark law the first to apply are the ones who get the trademark protection, and not the ones who first establish a brand in commercial use). Thankfully, we were the first to apply, no other "LocalMonero" trademark existed when we submitted our application. We've also attempted to contact the owners of localmonero.com once again, to no avail.
On November 16th, 2017 (~2.5 months after our launch), localmonero.com's registration updated, possibly indicating a new owner..........
https://np.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/7g5vhi/psa_localmonerocom_has_been_acquired_by_a/