What I don’t understand is why Lidl just didn’t buy the domain for £20 and put something innocuous up. Surely cheaper than a recall
That’s what I thought, it seems easier to regain control of the domain than trying to recall all products with it printed on.
Perhaps they were worried it would become a bigger scandal and thought a recall and refund would look better to the public.
Always surprises me how often domain renewals seem to get forgotten about too. Even big tech companies have been caught out by this.
real world link rot, lol
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Supermarket giant Lidl has issued a recall of Paw Patrol snacks after the website listed on the products’ packaging began displaying explicit content unsuitable for children.
Lidl, which operates more than 12,000 stores globally, is urging shoppers in the United Kingdom to return the snacks for a full refund.
Lidl’s recall notice [PDF] dated August 22 warns that the product’s packaging contains a web address that has been “compromised” to display content “not suitable for child consumption.”
“We recommend that customers refrain from viewing the URL and return this product to the nearest store where a full refund will be given,” Lidl states.
Lidl did not say how or why the website was allegedly compromised, but TechCrunch’s findings suggest that the web domain on the packaging had lapsed.
It’s not uncommon for web hosts to display ads as an additional source of revenue for domains that are empty or left to expire.
The original article contains 323 words, the summary contains 152 words. Saved 53%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Website in question is appykidsco.com. The linked story suggests that the domain has expired and these ads may be common for the webhost. They only appear in mobile mode.
Edit: it could also be a typo to appykids.com
If you manage to find an image of the box in high enough resolution it’s appykidsco.com
Good call on the mobile mode trick. I initially saw the chinese page (that google couldn’t translate so no idea what it was) and there was no porn there.
This is what it used to look like around the end of 2021: https://web.archive.org/web/20211128200225/https://www.appykidsco.com/
It died some time in 2022, was a blank page for some time then presumably expired and started showing chinese at the end of august this year (or at least that’s when wayback machine picked it up… the domain entry was last changed in February).
So the URL wasn’t ‘compromised’ it was abandoned.
I just went to it and there is definitely porn there
Removed by mod
Nice detective work!
Pawn Patrol?
Teehee
ACAB
