British mobile game development studio Grumpy Rhino Games has won an arbitration case at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) against Ukrainian citizen Glib Dorozhkin. The dispute involved the domain necromerger.net, which was illegally used to parasitize on the popularity of a famous game.
British mobile game development studio Grumpy Rhino Games has won an arbitration case at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) against Ukrainian citizen Glib Dorozhkin. The dispute involved the domain necromerger.net, which was illegally used to parasitize on the popularity of a famous game.
dev.ua tells how a Ukrainian cybersquatter tried to profit from someone else’s brand and why arbitration sided with the developers.
Grumpy Rhino Games Limited is a UK-based company that creates mobile games in the «idle/merge» genre. In August 2022, they released their main hit, the game NecroMerger.
The project quickly went viral and gathered a significant audience:
Over 2.4 million downloads on Google Play.
More than 370,000 installations in the App Store.
Although the British did not have an officially registered trademark certificate, the game’s immense popularity, large number of trailer views, and active community ensured the name’s legal status as an «unregistered trademark» (under common law). The developers' official website operates on the domain necromerger.com.
According to the case materials, in April 2025, Ukrainian Gleb Dorozhkin (also known under the nickname dantetraffic) registered the domain necromerger.net.
He didn’t just take a nice address, he created a site that imitated the game’s official resource:
Posted graphics and other materials protected by the developers' copyright.
Tried to pass off his resource as official.
Attracted traffic from inattentive Internet users for commercial gain (so-called passing off or impersonation).
Interestingly, there is a company in Cyprus called Dante Trafic. It positions itself as a traffic provider for iGaming. It is unknown whether this company is related to the Ukrainian.
By the time the complaint was filed with WIPO in December 2025, the fake website had already stopped working (became inactive), but the British studio’s lawyers had managed to record all evidence of piracy.
Gleb Dorozhkin completely ignored the process and did not provide any arguments in his defense. Arbitrator Edoardo Fano noted that despite the difficult situation and the war in Ukraine (because of which physical letters could not reach), electronic messages from the registrar successfully arrived at the defendant’s email. Therefore, the case was considered on the merits.
Decision: The arbitration panel decided to immediately transfer the rights to the necromerger.net domain to its legal owners, the British company Grumpy Rhino Games.
