FTC Issues Warning About Purported 'National Do No E-Mail Registry'

If you are an American who has submitted your e-mail address to a ‘National Do Not E-mail Registry’ that promises to reduce the amount of spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail) you receive, then you may be the victim of a scam, said the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

On Thursday, the FTC issued a warning that unsub.us, a site that had a graphical resemblance to the FTC’s own donotcall.gov national ‘Do Not Call’ anti-telemarketing registry, might be a fraud.

The next day, the anonymous owner of unsub.us revised his site’s design and added a disclaimer that the site was privately operated and was helping direct marketers, according to DMNews, the trade journal of the direct marketing industry. Unsub.us was registered on January 18 by someone in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, and hosted by Network Solutions. The director of policy at Network Solution told DMNews that the hosting company had been informed of the FTC’s warning and was investigating its client site’s conduct. Unsub.us today appears to have been taken offline.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.