Social Network Tagged.com Blamed for Sending Unsolicited Spam

Andrew Cuomo, Attorney General of New York, criticized Tagged.com for its alleged theft of personal credentials of 60 Million Internet surfers globally following its dispatch of e-mails that broke into users' private accounts.

Cuomo stated that the privacy of consumers was infringed and they had to suffer an awkward situation of saying sorry to each of their contacts whose names were in their address book because of Tagged's illegal and unethical behavior.

Attorney General further stated that the new spamming act was equivalent of raiding a home. The attack stole address books and sent bogus e-mails to all the personal contacts of an individual. This behavior, according to AG, was unacceptable in real world as well as in online world.

However, Tagged.com halted its e-mail spam during June 2009 following complaints, but it had already sent 60 Million e-mails by then.

The social-networking firm violated the law as it posed to send the spam mails from particular members instead of the firm itself. Users receiving those e-mails were required to log into the website to see the pictures that were actually non-existent.

Moreover, the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection stated that Tagged.com had deliberately made use of personal e-mails so that they could disguise commercial e-mails, an act that not just went against legal procedures but also damaged the faith of consumers.

Cuomo stated that a legal suit would be filed against Tagged to procure fines from it and to prevent it from committing fraudulent acts in future.

However, the problem that has surfaced is how such a lot of members happened to register with Tagged. In contrast to the popular social-networking websites like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, Tagged apparently utilized these websites to send unsolicited e-mails to fresh members pretending to be messages from Tagged users inviting their friends to see their photographs on Tagged.com.

The site was created by two Harvard math pupils, Johann Schleier-Smith and Greg Tseng, in 2004. It has claimed to be the third most popular social network website after Facebook and MySpace, bragging 80 Million users.

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» SPAMfighter News - 7/31/2009