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Beware of Tagged

Jun 8, 2009
By .
Irksome

This weekend I received a few emails saying that members of my church had sent me pictures, and inviting me to sign up with a social networking site called Tagged.com so that I could view them. The emails were calculated — in an extremely clumsy way — to make me feel bad about rejecting this overture from a fellow parishioner:

Please respond or [parishioner] may think you said no :(

Heaven forfend my conduct should ever draw a :( . I strive to make everyone :) , or possibly :P .

Anyway, it turns out that my instinct not to bite was the right one. Though Tagged.com is a "genuine" social networking site, it markets via an email scam. As Snopes notes, signing up will give Tagged.com access to your address book, which it will use to send spam to everyone you know, telling them falsely that you have sent them pictures or sent a greeting or something. Some trusting people have fallen for it.

Wikipedia tells me that Tagged is the brainchild of Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith, who are "Harvard graduates and entrepreneurs" (those being two categories that people are uncritically and unjustifiably impressed with). In a more perfect world, they would be sentenced to hand-copy every spam they have so generated onto the skin of moody pumas with a broken crayon. Greg and Johann, aren't you ashamed of yourselves?

Last 5 posts by Ken

9 Comments
Tags

8 Comments

  1. Teacher A  •  Jun 8, 2009 @11:06 am

    Good to know. Definitely got one of those this weekend and had been sitting on it, as "you have to click yes or no" struck me as presumptuous.

  2. Andrew  •  Jun 8, 2009 @11:08 am

    Welcome to the glorious future of Web 2.0: personalized spam.

  3. Jag  •  Jun 8, 2009 @11:28 am

    2 nights ago I'm watching TV downstairs and I get the frantic call from the bedroom. "I think I did something bad on the internet again!"

    As I'm walking upstairs, she starts explaining, that she only signed into this Tagged thing because she thought she had pictures from an old friend. I ask if she put in any information. "Only my Yahoo password". Oh. Good.

    As I'm firing up the Malware detector, the phone rings. It's her cousin in Arizona. "I think you guy have a virus or something". "Thanks. I'm on it." I respond and hang up.

    So she has spammed her entire Yahoo contact list with Tagged requests, including old friends, coaches and teachers (who thinks my son is brilliant, but now obviously and incorrectly thinks he gets it from me).

    So I send an email to her entire contact list telling them not to open the Tagged email, unsubscribe her from the website and change her passwords.

    I then read the same Wiki entry about Tagged that Ken posted and was shocked that these scumbags were able to obtain funding to further their scam.

    My wife has promised never to do anything bad on the internet again. I don't believe her.

  4. Bob  •  Jun 8, 2009 @11:33 am

    I have to wonder whether they are really so stupid as to think that spamming people's entire contact list is a good way to drum up business and positive word of mouth or if they know people will be pissed, but don't care because they are actually just trying to increase the user base quickly to grab some venture capital and run.

  5. Patrick  •  Jun 8, 2009 @11:51 am

    Ken I took the liberty of removing the direct link to Tagged from your post, for reasons that you'll understand immediately.

    If the link needed to be there for some reason, please return it.

  6. Grandy  •  Jun 8, 2009 @11:51 am

    My money is on "grab venture capital and run".

  7. Linus  •  Jun 8, 2009 @12:39 pm

    Hey, I got one of those this weekend too. Except it was from a creepy ex-co-worker, so I just deleted it. Lucky.

  8. Bob  •  Jun 8, 2009 @10:37 pm

    There seems to be a mistake in the post. It should have read "moody hungry pumas".

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