Tagged.com Engaged In Identity Theft and Spamming Says New York Attorney General
Tagged.com, one of the fastest growing social networking sites, has more than eight million monthly visitors – but New York State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo charges that the company built its following by raiding email address books, stealing identities and spamming millions of people. Cuomo has served Tagged with formal notice that his office intends to sue the company for deceptive email marketing practices and invasion of privacy.
In a press release Cuomo charges that:
“Tagged devised an illegal plan to lure new members and artificially inflate traffic on its site. Consumers who visited Tagged were tricked into providing the company with access to their personal email contacts, which the company then used to send millions of promotional emails. Tagged disguised these solicitations to make them appear as if they were coming from a personal contact, when they were actually spam.
“Between April and June this year, Tagged sent tens of millions of misleading emails to unsuspecting recipients stating that Tagged members had posted private photos online for their friends to view. In reality, no such photos existed and the email was not from their friends. When recipients of these fraudulent emails tried to access the photos, they were forced to become a new member of Tagged. The company would then illegally gain access to their personal email contacts to send more fraudulent invitations.”
“This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people,” Cuomo said. “Consumers had their privacy invaded and were forced into the embarrassing position of having to apologize to all their email contacts for Tagged’s unethical – and illegal – behavior. This very virulent form of spam is the online equivalent of breaking into a home, stealing address books, and sending phony mail to all of an individual’s personal contacts. We would never accept this behavior in the real world, and we cannot accept it online.”
The Attorney General’s lawsuit would seek to stop Tagged from engaging in these fraudulent practices and would seek fines from the company. Tagged, which was recently reviewed by Black Web 2.0, has temporarily suspended its email marketing campaign.
Tagged’s traffic peaked in June with eight million unique visits, according to Compete.com. Overall it became the third-largest social networking site, claiming 80 million registered users – many of them African-American and Hispanic.
Category: News, web 2.0 | Tags: Andrew M. Cuomo, Identity Theft, Spamming, tagged.com
About the Author I have been knocking around the digital world since, well, a very long time. I can remember watching AP stories crawl across the screen on 300-baud dial-up during the early days of Compuserve and Prodigy. And yes, I vividly remember those pay-by-the-hour days on AOL.
Since those early times I have held a variety of jobs in the interactive space, but I am probably best known for founding the original blackvoices.com. I raised $5 million in start-up money from Tribune Co. and hired a staff totaling nearly 40, with offices in L.A., Chicago and New York. Later, we sold the company to AOL, where it continues to thrive as one of the leaders in its category.
Today I am still active in the space consulting with folks on a variety of projects.
See all posts by Barry Cooper.
There’s an example of odd behavior — as opposed to saying you were with tag at the start of your post, you waited until the very end — sketchy. In addition, your CEO was already fined for similar behavior.
Barry – I’d like to point you and your readers to a recent article by the CEO of Tagged regarding this matter….here’s the first part of the post from Tagged’s Blog:
There has been a lot of press regarding New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s announcement yesterday that he intends to bring a lawsuit against Tagged.
We are dismayed that Cuomo’s office, which has shown itself to be fairly well-versed in the Internet, would issue an inaccurate and inflammatory accusation. We can only believe that they have not carefully reviewed the facts.
So here are the facts. Let them speak for themselves.
Tagged has not “raided” email address books, “stolen identities” or “spammed” millions of people. The descriptive analogy to “breaking into a home, stealing address books, and sending phony mail” to a person’s contacts is evocative, but it is not accurate.
The ”invite your friends” practice that the A/G’s office objects to has been standard practice among all top social networks for over five years. To compare this practice to “spam” or “identity theft” generates unnecessary alarm among consumers.
Like those social networks – including Facebook and MySpace – Tagged allows its users, if they choose, to import their email contacts from any of four popular email services (Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail or AOL Mail) to identify contacts that are already members of Tagged and to invite their contacts (including non-members) to join their network on Tagged.
Please read the rest here of the post : http://blog.tagged.com/?m=200907
Yes – I am with Tagged and I appreciate this opportunity to add additional clarification and perspective with you and the readers of Black Web 2.0. I also would like to note that our members continue to use and enjoy the site by the millions everyday and we are working closely with the NYAG office to resolve the matter soon.
Thank you again
Steve