Tagged.com and the courts

I’ve seen multiple reports of Tagged.com and their interactions on various sides of the courtroom aisle.
On the good side, Tagged.com won a judgment against a spammer sending spam to Tagged.com users. (Tagged has a post on their blog about the win, but the direct link to that article doesn’t work).
On the minus side, yet another ruling against tagged.com. They’ve been accused of sending spam, including some mail that looks like a phish. They recently settled in a CA court, agreeing to dispose of certain addresses collected during a 3 month period in 2009.

Tagged promised that it will destroy address book information that was scraped from users who joined the site between April and June, if those users either didn’t send any invitations to their contacts or invited all of their contacts to join the site. The company did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement.

Their victory against the spammer might be more compelling if they, themselves, were not repeatedly ending up at the defense table for customer unfriendly practices.

TWSD: Using FOIA requests for email addresses
AOL transmitting 4xx error for user unknown

Related Posts

FBI indicts 19 for internet related fraud

A federal grand jury in Dallas returned an indictment this week charging 19 individuals with conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud. 15 of the defendants are charged with email fraud. All in all, these defendants are accused of defrauding various companies, from telcos to web developers, of $15,000,000.

Read More

Important notification spammers break the law

I’m currently being inundated at multiple address with spam advertising spamming services. Most of these notices have the subject line: IMPORTANT NOTIFICATION. The text includes:

Read More

TWSD: Using FOIA requests for email addresses

Mickey has a good summary of what’s going on in Maine where the courts forced the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife to sell the email addresses of license purchasers to a commercial company.
There isn’t permission associated with this and the commercial company has no pretense that the recipients want to receive mail from them. This is a bad idea and a bad way to get email addresses and is no better than spammers scraping addresses from every website mentioning “fishing” or “hunting.”

Read More