What is "pharming"?
Pharming is when somebody will purchase domain names that are very similar to common domain names. Maybe they have one letter that's different. So instead of "mcdonalds.com", it will be "mcdonald.com" in the hope that people who misspelled the original domain will come to that site and think it's a legitimate one. Obviously, McDonald's people are going to know the difference, but smaller businesses or other businesses are often fooled because they've arrived at a site that they've expected to arrive at. They don't know that they've misspelled the domain. So they pharm these sites, and they have more than one of them. Through these pharm sites, they may engage in false, fraudulent e-commerce. Basically they might sell you things that don't exist or that they're not going to send you. They might collect information under the guise of some kind of study or poll or something like that, and again, collect the information to sell it. It typically might mean that they're not going to do what they claim to do. However, in some circumstances they are simply capitalizing on the fact that someone will misspell something and they may sell you sneakers for a few dollars less, because it's "Nikee" with two e's, or something like that.
