Saturday, 17 February 2007
Tagged... for SPAM!
I received an invite to a social networking site from someone I hadn't heard of before claiming to be my friend. I figured I know hundreds of people online due to my websites so thought I'd at least check the site out. The site is www.tagged.com and it looked rather nice. The design is cleaner and easier to understand than other sites in the genre (can I use "genre" to talk about websites?) and seemed very secure. They even have a whole page about internet safety!
So I signed up. This is where I became a bit suspicious. After signing up, instead of being taken to my profile page I was forwarded to a page to enter my hotmail email address AND password with no way to exit the page or option to not invite every single person in my address book. The fact that there was no way out of this step seemed a bit strange so I simply typed in "tagged.com" in the address bar to get back to the site's main page.
Doing this took me to my profile page with my "friend" already in my friend's list. I then decided to look around the site some more and it occurred to me how incredibly good looking and posed all the "members" are on the main page are. It's like someone had bought a collection of royalty free photos, about 20 of them and put them on random display. Click refresh a few times and you'll see all the random "members" you'll ever see.
After checking my email (my real one) I was surprised to see that tagged.com had signed me up for Post Markers Direct or something! They were asking me for confirmation to recieve all these "amazing offers", blah, blah, blah. Of course I deleted the email, came back to tagged.com and cancelled my account. Luckily, cancelling your account is easy to do and they give you a feedback box to explain why you're doing so.
I let them know why in about 100 words.
This whole site just smells like a scam. I'm sure there are some real people on there (who are probably getting a lot more spam now that they've joined) but for the most part it seems set up to trick users into making tagged.com money.
Avoid like the plague.
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Labels: internet
posted by Brad at
12:05 AM
2 Comments:
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Welcome. My name's Brad and I'm about to start my fifth year in Tokyo, Japan though lately I've found that that defines me as badly as saying I'm from Sydney, Australia.
I hate that crap, it really drives me up the wall. I also hate people that sign up their entire address book, which usually includes two or three of my site-related/fanlisting-related email addresses, which all get invited to Social Media Site X, isn't it great?? :P
Yeah, and I did some more surfing around and turns out this company was sued for spamming people so they changed their name and voilà! Tagged.com!