The homoglyph attack is a very old and often abused technique. A related, though not identical one, is bit flipping where a single character is swapped in a domain name and you prey on those who make misspellings. It turns out, however, that it isn't even necessary for someone to make a blatant error like that...
I actually purchased a few domain of erroneous domain names spellings for the purpose of experimentation and ended up with A LOT of traffic.
Because I got so much traffic, I decided to make the sites useful, and I wrote a little php script that downloads the latest technology RSS feeds and displayed the headlines.
On one particular domain I was getting more than 20 hits per day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPbyDSvGasw [DEFCON 21: DNS May Be Hazardous To Your Health]