[6][7] Because the purpose is often malicious, "spoof" (an expression whose base meaning is innocent parody) is a poor term for this activity so that more accountable organisations such as government departments and banks tend to avoid it, preferring more explicit descriptors such as "fraud", "counterfeit" or "phishing".
"[10] A similar incident occurred in 2023 when the culture jamming collective Barbie Liberation Organization created a satirical parody page closely resembling the Mattel corporate website using the URL mattel-corporate.com[11] where they announced a fictitious line of Barbie dolls called "MyCelia EcoWarrior" alongside a series of hoax videos with actress Daryl Hannah posing as a spokesperson for Mattel to lend further legitimacy to the nonexistent dolls, leveraging the publicity surrounding the 2023 live-action film.
[12] The website's heavy resemblance to the legitimate Mattel corporate site led to a number of news outlets mistakenly reporting it as real, to which they eventually issued a correction and removed the articles in question.
Essentially, OpenDNS has gathered a large database from various anti-phishing and anti-botnet organizations as well as its own data to compile a list of known website spoofing offenders.
APWG statistics show that most phishing attacks use URLs, not domain names, so there would be a large amount of website spoofing that OpenDNS would be unable to track.