Uh oh. There must be some red faces at the FBI’s cybercrime division at the moment.

You see, when the Feds seize websites that they believe are breaking the law they like to freeze the company’s assets and suspend the sites themselves, displaying a big fat message declaring what they have done.

I suppose they think it acts as a warning to others who might be considering a career in online crime and piracy.

Here is the kind of thing you would expect to see.

In that particular example, it’s the website of the once popular MegaUpload file-sharing site, seized in January 2012 after it and its high profile founder Kim Dotcom were accused of harbouring millions of copyright-breaching files.

When you see a message like that you’re not looking at the real MegaUpload website – instead, the FBI has redirected traffic to a server under their own control, containing the message, via its own name servers.

Until recently, a domain under the FBI’s control – cirfu.net (it stands for Cyber Initiative and Resource Fusion Unit) – was pointing visitors to MegaUpload and other sites to servers under the control of the FBI.

But this is where the red faces come in.

Because someone at the FBI forgot to renew the cirfu.net domain, and it was snapped up by a black hat SEO practitioner calling himself “Earl Grey”.

And what did “Earl Grey” do with the domain name he had snaffled from under the very noses of the FBI? Well, as Torrent Freak reports, it seems he took the opportunity to use it to help spammers, scammers and hackers peddle their wares.

Visitors to MegaUpload and other sites were greeted not with a message saying the site was shut down, but instead income-generating adverts – including links to malware downloads, bogus software updates, and even a bogus BBC News report claiming that an iPhone 6 can be yours for just Â£1.00.

The shy and retiring Kim DotCom himself commented on the incident on his Twitter account:

Joking aside, websites that the world believed were under the control of the FBI’s elite cybercrime-fighting team were snapped up by an opportunist and have – no doubt – resulted in innocent users’ being scammed or having their computers infected with malware.

If internet experts at the US government cannot be relied upon to properly manage and police the websites they own, what hope have businesses in keeping proper tabs on the multitude of domains that their company may have purchased over the years.

The truth is that stunts like this are being pulled all the time, all over the world. What’s different this time is that it was the FBI which was caught with its pants down, and the publicity-friendly Kim DotCom who helped inform the world’s media about the agency’s embarrassing snafu.