We all make mistakes. Lord knows, I do (having noticed this morning that I spelt the surname of the man who I sort-of-hope will be the next Taoiseach as “Kenney”!). But in this “knowledge economy” there’s now money to be made, and lots of it, from slips at the keyboard. Take the rather noisome figure of Kevin Ham, a Canadian of Korean parentage who has made a fortune from Internet domain names.

One wheeze Ham has exploited to build his estimated $300 million dollar “empire” is based on something as basic as wrongly entered URLs. Business 2.0 magazine explains:

“[W]hat few people know is that he’s also the man behind the domain world’s latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type “.cm” instead of “.com” at the end of a domain name.

Try it with almost any name you can think of — Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm — and you’ll land on a page called Agoga.com, a site filled with ads served up by Yahoo (Charts, Fortune 500).

Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad — as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code — just as Germany runs all names that end with .de.

The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com, the mother lode of all domains. Ham landed connections to the Cameroon government and flew in his people to reroute the traffic. And if he gets his way, Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) will be his as well.”

What seems particularly galling about Ham’s scam is that the perpetrator apparently sees himself as a committed Christian, a man who “steers conversations about business back to the Bible.” As if the shell-game of “typo-squatting” is all part of the Lord’s way.