BLACKSBURG, Va.

Within minutes of the Virginia Tech massacre, online domain names related to the tragedy were snapped up by people hoping to sell them off for a profit or use them to link to advertisers.

The cost of registering such domains is generally less than $10, but some are now being auctioned off for thousands, a practice experts say has become commonplace.

“Any time there’s a big news event, people go register the domain names,” says Christine N. Jones, general counsel for GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest domain registration service. “Nine-eleven they did it, Katrina they did it, the tsunami in southeast Asia they did it.”

A few hours after the rampage, Fred McChesney, a 48-year-old Phoenix man began buying dozens of names, including CampusKillings.com, VirginiaTechMurders.com and SlaughterInVirginia.com.

McChesney says he saw it as an opportunity to show his contempt for firearms by featuring anti-gun content on the domains he is selling, but he also saw it as an opportunity to cash in.

“Everyone is profiting off of this,” McChesney says. “I’m not hurting anyone.”

But the profiteering has drawn harsh criticism by those affected by the killings.

“If anybody is working to make a profit off of this tragedy by selling these kinds of things, it’s just a crying shame,” says university spokesman Mark Owczarski. “Obviously, you wouldn’t want anybody to make a profit off something as horrendous as this.”

Jeremiah Johnston, chief operating officer for domain name broker Sedo.com, says his company has shut down domains named after the victims as well as dozens of others related to the tragedy, including BlacksburgBloodbath.com and SchoolSlaughter.com.

“We do feel that they fly in the face of our offensive domain policy,” Johnston says. “It is quite tasteless.”

GoDaddy.com shut down one site purporting to raise money for the victims’ families after university officials said they were not aware of any such charity, says Jones.