Jeremy Green Eche of Brooklyn buys websites for hypothetical presidential tickets and saves them for years. He’s owned HarrisWalz.com since 2020, and hopes to sell it to the campaign for $15,000.
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By the time Vice President Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, the website HarrisWalz.com was already taken.
In fact, it was snatched up four years ago — and not by either candidate, but by a politically prescient, Brooklyn-based millennial.
Jeremy Green Eche, 36, is a trademark attorney who also runs an online marketplace where people can buy and sell registered trademarks and domains. He’s probably better known as a domain investor.
“I also freely call myself a domain squatter or a cybersquatter,” he says. “It’s a pejorative term, but I don’t mind using it because it’s still accurate.”
A couple times a year, Eche goes on a “buying spree” on sites like GoDaddy and Name.com, purchasing domain names for all sorts of hypothetical presidential tickets.
In August 2020, anticipating Harris might run again in the future, he snapped up 15 Harris-related domain names, combined with “every sort of folksy white man I could think of who was big at the time.” Those include Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and, of course, Walz.
It’s largely guesswork, though Eche keeps up with politics (he’s a member of New York City’s Democratic Socialists of America chapter) and links his knack for recognizing rising political stars to his college gig as an autograph dealer.
“There’s probably like four or five other people doing it and I don’t know them,” he says of cybersquatting. “I just think it’s really fun to register a domain and then have this kind of payoff where I just hit the jackpot and I get a little news cycle and it’s just kind of a good time for me.
