I’m Steering Clear of Tagged.com (You Should, Too!)
A problem with having your job/business involving writing about and reviewing web apps is that you tend to sign up for too many sites than you can handle. Worse is that you sometimes end up signing up for outright scams. And since you give some info to these people, you’re practically giving them the right to spam your email inbox with promotional material.
I recently got an invite (yet another one) into tagged.com, and I thought I might give it a try. I signed up and it seemed simple enough until I got to the screen prompting me to enter my Gmail password. I thought, WTF? What kind of phishing scheme is this? It doesn’t even give me an option to skip this step.
It asks innocently enough, which is in the guise of checking your address book for users already existing in the system. But what Tagged will really do is send email to everyone in your address book inviting them into the system and subjecting them to the very same process. It will not even ask you to choose which among your contacts they can spam.
I guess I was stupid enough to sign up for tagged.com. I’m not going to be stupid enough to enter my Gmail password. But what about 90+% of the population who are not as smart as I? They’re likely to just enter their passwords and end up spamming everyone on their address book. The cycle then continues. Lord knows how many email addresses and even passwords these guys have already harvested.
Tsk. This seemed like old news (horrors, even Wikipedia says so). Why, oh, why did I fall for this?
Stay away from tagged.com!
This is one of the worst sites on the net. Tricking people out of their contact list is illegal.This jerk at abuse
makes it voluntary on your part if you click “yes” . You gave them the right to take you contacts list without your knowledge…Yeh, that sound like stealing all right!
Should a stranger be asking you for your email login? Most of you know you should not do that, but slick
trickery can fool some.
Read on:
First I want to say, I did not click on yes or no….
I complained to abuse@above.net on behalf of someone else “victim ” # ?(who knows)
and hope you all will to. The problem is the above.net person seemed to be defensive of this site, which is unusual. In every case I am aware of, they are trying to “protect” the consumer, but in this case, I was threatened with legal action when I called it “stealing” when it is in fact just that, and I am gathering information from this site as well as others, and may contact people to get declarations if this group of scammers try to threaten me again..Here is the text of the message I received from so called “abuse” see if this sounds like the position someone takes, who is trying to be on the side of you and others who have been scammed by this site.
their position:
Dear Farhana,
“Steal” is a very strong term and carrying possible severe penalties. In every instance that I’ve investigated to date, the email address and specifically the password for the email account was provided freely by the complainant.
Please provide any evidence that you may have, not just the accusation, that your email password was obtained by means other than by you providing it to them.
Sincerely,
Larry McDonald
Policy Enforcement
AboveNet Communications, Inc.
http://www.above.net/corporate/acceptableuse.html
http://www.above.net/corporate/antispam.html
farhana said this on January 25, 2008 10:59 am
[...] are countless other similar applications whose main intent would be to phish for information like tagged.com, Yaari, and the [...]
Don’t Give Out Your Gmail Password. Ever. said this on March 29, 2008 3:11 am
hi
066760807 said this on May 13, 2008 8:03 am
hi ana redonau
066760807 said this on May 13, 2008 8:04 am
Your blog posts information that tagged.com is on AboveNet's network. Tagged.com is not on AboveNet's network.
The email referenced was dated March 2007 and that information is no longer valid.
AboveNet Communications, Inc.
Policy Enforcement
http://www.above.net/corporate/acceptableuse.html
http://www.above.net/corporate/antispam.html
Policy Enforcement said this on June 9, 2009 7:14 pm