People do this for SEO purposes. They think that this increases the amount of backlinks to their site, thus increasing their rank in Google and other search engines.
This is less true than it used to be, but people still do it.
This is less true than it used to be, but people still do it.
And they're not obvious mouse slips like redirecting googl.com -> google.com - they're more of the form <verb>mydomain.com.
I was mostly interested in what the actual play from them here is tbh
The fraudulent domains are only sending traffic to OP.
My guess is that they want to either phish visitors, or they want to ask OP for affiliate revenue, like a digital version of the guys who wash your windshield or your shoes without asking first, and then ask for money.
Or planning to threaten to divert organic traffic through the impersonation domains away from the canonical domain, if you don't pay them.