I got an invitation to join tagged.com today informing me someone I knew had sent me some photos. I clicked on a link to see if I could download the pictures, but the service required me to ‘register’ with tagged.com first. Well, I thought this was an inconvenience, but I didn’t want to disappoint the person who sent me the photos so I started the lengthy procedure that started out asking me for the usual username/password. But that wasn’t the only information they wanted. As I got into it, I started getting screen after screen of ‘offers’ and some that made mention of charging my phone number a sizable monthly fee for some service or other. I found the tiny ‘skip this’ button on each page and became exasperated in my quest to find said photos. I must have turned down 10 dubious offers.

The real deal breaker came when it asked for my gmail account password. Wait a minute! You want my email account PASSWORD, so you can ‘match me up with my other friends’? It was about that time that everything became painfully clear. This dirtbag company wasn’t going to show me any pictures that my friend had sent me, it simply duped her into giving her email password and they had harvested her ENTIRE ADDRESS BOOK and were sending out these invitations to everyone in it.

I completed the registration (without giving up my gmail password) and sure enough, there wasn’t even a single picture posted to my friend’s account. What a scumbag company!

Companies that pull stunts like this (Grouply is another one) should be sued out of existence and have their entire staff incarcerated. I hate when companies use a person’s goodwill to send messages out without the person’s explicit consent just to induce others who trust that person that they need to register to get some important information. Then they dupe THOSE victims into giving up their email passwords and propagate the duplicity ad infinitum.

I unregistered with this pathetic service and let them know my sentiments on the stunt they had just pulled.

Whenever you get a dubious offer via email even if it comes from a trustworthy source, you should do a search on the company’s name affiliated with the email and append the word ‘scam’. And never give out your Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail password to anyone. I’d have saved some time and frustration had I done a web search first on tagged.com because there are plenty of people that have called out these scammers including snopes. Hopefully, you found this posting before you wasted any time with this fraudulent operation.