FTC halts hawkers of .usa addresses 

By Lisa M. Bowman 
March 11, 2002

The Federal Trade Commission said Monday that it has busted a company that preyed on people's patriotism by selling them .usa addresses that don't work on the Web. 

The FTC said it won a temporary injunction prohibiting the U.K.-based operators of the dotusa.com Web site from peddling .usa domain names. The decision by a federal judge in Chicago last week followed an investigation by the FTC, British law enforcement and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body charged with administering domain names. 

FTC officials said the operation netted more than $1 million by sending spam to people urging them to "Be Patriotic!" and asking: "Who wants to be .com when you can now be .USA?" 

The spam encouraged people to fork over $59 for a Web address. However, the FTC said the site failed to notify consumers that the domain names have not been approved to function the same way as addresses ending in .com. 

"The bogus domain names don't work on the Internet," said J. Howard Beales, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "They're not just unlisted. They're unconnected." 

Details at: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-856979.html

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