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.