Tagged.com is going to jail for identity theft and spamming
Staff Writer
2009-08-17
.bugnews.bloggieblog.com .
If you have not heard of Tagged.com, you are not on any social networking sites. Tagged.com is a new kid on the block compared to other sites. It has a large Spanish speaking and black or African American following with most of its members. Tagged.com started around the time Blackplanet.com was being sold but, you did not hear that from me.
Recently, the New York state's attorney office has brought up chargers against this company. Cumo is claiming Tagged.com used sent false emails to others about some pictures. Once the email was received, the viewer was required to join the site. Cumo is saying this was false advertisement. Although Myspace and other sites use this email sending , tagged.com must have broken the Law somehow.
This is how the email spamming worked for tagged and many other sites. Once you sign up, you asked for your email and password for your email account which could be hosted on Yahoo, MSN, and GMAIL. All the sites allow API programming to access your email list and advise the people you know to come check out the new site with little or no effort from you .
Some statements from the press release out of New York.
“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.”