(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — As government officials continue to take more direct action against online crime, New York state Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo is planning a lawsuit against social-networking site Tagged.com (www.tagged.com), accusing it of devising an illegal plan to attract new members and getting their email addresses, which it then used to deliver tens of millions of spam emails in the past two months.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, Cuomo said Tagged was responsible for deceptive email marketing as well as the invasion of privacy between April and June. “This company stole the address books and identities of millions of people,” Cuomo told the Journal.
Cuomo alleges that Tagged sent misleading emails to individuals on members’ contacts, saying that Tagged members had posted private photos online for friends to view online and that they had to join Tagged to view the nonexistent photos. Those taken in by the email were then used to access more personal email contacts, making the number of fraudulent emails snowball to tens of millions of messages.
Tagged contends that its friend invitation policy is no different than other social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.
“Tagged has not ‘raided’ email address books, ‘stolen identities’ or ‘spammed’ millions of people,” Tagged chief executive officer Greg Tseng wrote in a Friday blog post. “The ‘invite your friends’ practice that the A/G’s office objects to has been standard practice among all top social networks for over five years. To compare this practice to “spam” or ‘identity theft’ generates unnecessary alarm on behalf of consumers.”
New York’s Attorney General is just the latest government official to attempt to take online crime into their own hands. In late 2008, Kentucky’s governor attempted to seize more than 100 overseas Internet domain names accused of violating state gambling laws. Now, as then, one side said the other did not properly understanding the nature of the Internet, and the other side said it did not comprehend the rule of law.
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