The Tagged Spam System
Some of my friends and family have fallen victim to an email spamming system from tagged.com. The controversy here, and what seems to be somewhat in question is the legitimacy of this apparent social networking site. According to TechCrunch in a posting from 2007, Tagged seems to be a “legitimate” social networking site. However, I believe that the company is using dishonest and inappropriate tactics in order to gain new membership to their site. So of course TechCruch is reporting that the site has seen explosive growth… what a bunch of idiots (Tagged, not TechCrunch).
When someone gets an invite to see photos on tagged.com, it comes from someone you know and the originating email address is not from the tagged.com domain. If you sign up with tagged.com it will search and spam your entire contact list with invitations to tagged.
What you need to know
Here’s what you need to know about Tagged:
- Tagged is a legitimate social networking site started by Greg Tseng in 2004
- The company uses “viral” marketing techniques to gain new membership by harvesting email addresses when new users sign up
- While the site does not utilize malware, the tactics used by Tagged have led me to believe it should be avoided at all costs
- Since Tagged does not seem to use malware your computer should be safe, however your email address book is not
What can I do?
I strongly urge anyone to reconsider Tagged as their social networking site of choice. If you have fallen victim to this ridiculous website, you can cancel by going here while signed in: http://www.tagged.com/account_cancel.html and in the future ignore and delete all invites from tagged.
Alternatively you can click on the “account” link in the upper right side of your Tagged screen (you have to be logged in) and you can cancel your account from there.
I created a new email address (something like taggedsucks@aol.com heh heh…) so I could test out Tagged for myself. From my experience the site is full of spam, false advertising, annoying advertising, an asinine interface, and nothing but trouble. I was able to successfully cancel my account without much hassle which was amazing to say the least.
Expose it
If you have any experiences with Tagged, feel free to let me know in the comments section! Also be sure to tell everyone you know to ignore email messages from Tagged. We need to expose this website for the fraud it is.
Update: Istok Pavlovic has an excellent post on his blog with some insight and stats on the subject as well!
