There are web hosting companies that have a deal where hosting your site with them will allow you one free domain name registration (perhaps more with costlier packages). The only catch is that one is generally limited to registering a free domain for one year at a time. Those wanting multi-year registration would have to pay full price which can add up quickly -- especially for those managing multiple domain name registrations.
I don't know if GoDaddy has such a deal, but registering a domain for one year at a time isn't as automatically suspicious as might have been at one time. However the fact SJU uses what looks like the relatively-new .university domain definitely comes across as a suspicious, scammy gimmick -- especially after an internet search for information on the this particular TLD brought up a page that recommends it for unaccredited universities. Most reputable ones would seemingly be eligible for .edu.
Assuming Yaniv has some sort of ties to the site, this would once again reflect on Yaniv's affinity for the shady side of technology and the internet.
Anything is possible at this point. Using the site as a honeypot would likely be useless, though. Most tech-savvy people generally don't browse suspicious sites unprotected and tend to use proxies, anonymizers, VPNs, etc. which would make the raw stats meaningless.
