Dot-USA No Longer For Sale.

Education Technology News, March, 2002

Dot-USA No Longer For Sale -- Actually, dot-USA, never was for sale. That's why a U.S. District Court, at the behest of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), has shut down several businesses that were preying on patriotic, albeit uninformed, Americans and selling them domain names that did not exist.

The bogus businesses sold domain names ending in suffixes such as dot-BRIT, dot-BET and dot-USA. According to FTC, after Sept. 11, the companies "launched an aggressive spam campaign in the United States to advertise the domain names ending in dot-USA. Subject lines in their e-mails read: 'Be Patriotic! Register .USA Domains.'" According to FTC, the dot-USA names were sold for $59 apiece and the scammers likely pocketed more than $1 million.