Posted by John Vinson

It’s tough to engage in email advertising these days. The market isn’t going anywhere, as numbers indicate a rise. However, stories like this one, involving one of the largest websites on the internet engaging in email fraud certainly doesn’t help.

Tagged.com has been ordered to pay the state of New York and Texas $750,000 in damages for intruding on member’s contact list in order to send out millions of promotional emails to potential users. The website is a social networking platform, and is one of the most visited sites on the web.
You might be saying to yourself, ’sounds like a pretty creative idea. It would be if Tagged.com sent the emails out as themselves. Instead, the site misled their recipients by making the emails appear to be from friends on Tagged.com. Hence, the scandal.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, the New York Attorney General, reached a settlement with Tagged.com to pay $500,000 in penalties, and to change their guidelines involving information use of their members.

What Tagged.com was doing was actually genius, while being sinister as well. The website would send out emails to people making it seem that they came from the user who had just posted photos on the site. This of course led to clicks, and provided a reason for more people to sign up for the social networking site.

Cuomo stated specifically, the reason for his prosecution, “Unsuspecting users had no idea that Tagged had hijacked the email addresses of their colleagues, families and friends for the purpose of blasting them with spam,” said Attorney General Cuomo. “This agreement holds the company accountable for its invasion of privacy and puts the proper safeguards in place to keep it from happening again.”

If you’re an email advertiser, this story has you understandably angry. In a day and age where so much content in emails is met with cynicism, it’s hard to run a clean and decent campaign. Spam will always be around, but we like to think that many of the industry leading companies are above the pettiness that bots and spammers resort to.

Tagged.com didn’t just penalize themselves, but set back email advertising as a whole.

About the Author: John is a staff writer for WebProNews.