Tagged.com Sued By NY AG

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced today that his office intends to sue social networking site Tagged for deceptive email marking practices and invasion of privacy.

Cuomo charges Tagged created an illegal plan to lure new members and artificially inflate traffic on its site. Users who visited Tagged were tricked into providing the company with access to their personal email contacts, which the company used to send millions of promotional emails. Tagged disguised the emails to make them look like they were coming from a personal contact, when they were actually spam.

Between April and June this year, Tagged sent millions of misleading emails to recipients stating that Tagged members had posted private photos online for their friends to view. In reality, the photos did not exist and the email was not from their friends. When the recipients tried to access the photos, they were required to become a new member of Tagged. The company would then gain access to their email contacts and send more bogus invitations.

Andrew Cuomo

"This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people," said Attorney General Cuomo. "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 goal of the lawsuit is to stop Tagged from sending out spam and would seek fines from the company. The company temporarily suspended its spam campaign in June due to users complaints, but it had already sent over 60 million emails worldwide.

There are 11 Comments. Add Yours.

Stupidscript
July 9, 2009 at 5:59 pm

Allowing Tagged.com to continue its operations while slapping its wrist for harvesting contact information and subsequently spamming will only punish them for past behavior. The simple fact is that Tagged.com’s BUSINESS MODEL relies on harvesting contact info and then selling that data as frequently as possible. The only true appropriate punishment for a company who’s raison d’etre is to commit criminal activities is … to shut down the company and imprison the executives who dreamed the whole thing up. Fines are not even close to being enough to keep them from doing what they do for a living.
Puja Mishra
July 10, 2009 at 9:47 am

hi
very nice blog post

thank you
Scott of Texas Divorce Online
July 10, 2009 at 10:46 am

I received lots of emails from tagged.com saying that my friends posted this and that but I never bothered registering to the site. Looks like I made the right decision.
debbie
July 12, 2009 at 9:08 am

I am a member of the Tagged community I have a profile for over a year now . Yes Spamming is rampant in all Chatrooms of Tagged. Cam Girls Posing as members and entering the chatrooms in 2′s and 3′s advertising their websites for men and Bi’s to visit then asking for their CREDIT CARDS . And Most of all Stealing of Profiles and using it to annoy other Chatters. MY profile was victimized and nothing has been done even when i click REPORT on the Person who took my profile and used it to Swear and Cuss the Chatters . Nothing has been done about it. I hope this is a Wake up call for Greg Tseng and Company . Let me put it in a POSITIVE NOTE: Tagged is not all That Bad . I met all kinds of online Friends while chatting and I’m still friends with them for a year now and we regularly keep in touhc by phone and emails and MSN and Facebook.
Christopher
July 12, 2009 at 1:13 pm

I have never had an issue with Tagged and have used them for over a year. Sounds like when the economy goes down more people sue.
Guest
July 12, 2009 at 1:25 pm

usual story, you get some old man in his basement spamming the world, he is jailed, blacklisted, plastered all over spamhaus etc. then you get these big companies allowed to do it – because they can pay the fines.

This is simply a cash generating exercise for government coffers.
Gin
July 12, 2009 at 2:03 pm

I have been on Tagged for about 2 yrs and NEVER had any problems or complaints from any of my friends about such emails.

I have enjoyed a friendship with our deployed soldiers through Tagged for the last year.

I agree, when people are hurting for money it seems they got to sue somebody. A fine, ok but don’t let me and my friendship with our soldiers lose out.
Gin
July 12, 2009 at 2:23 pm

One other note, it is personal choice to send emails to our friends. I sent my site url to a few friends but it all goes back to how one chooses to use a site and Tagged is not the only one offering ‘invite your friends’ option.
CT
July 12, 2009 at 6:59 pm

I have never had one issue with Tagged and no one has ever gotten any “supposedly spam” emails. People sure like to get “sue happy”~can we say….greed???

I am a very happy member of Tagged and have met a lot of great people and one in particular and will continue to rate Tagged as one of my top sites over a lot of other ones out there!

~Annonymous
Linda
July 16, 2009 at 8:06 pm

I have been a Member for a couple of years and none of my Friends have ever been mailed or approached by Tagged. There is a facility that you have the option of using on the Friends page as to whether you want to invite any friends onto the site. As I have never clicked on it – my friends have never been approached.

All I can say that is detrimental to Tagged is that they are not quick enough to delete scammers/pornograhers etc. that join the site but we have a few “detectives” on there who are looking after business.
Japanese recipes
December 2, 2009 at 1:35 am

Thanks for the share.. nice post.. I got lots of spam mails from tagged everyday.