I got a few emails today from the guy who rented us our beach condo last year. The subject was “Jim sent you photos on Tagged :)” and the body said:
Jim Nothisrealname
Jim Nothisrealname sent you photos on Tagged
Want to see the photos?Click Yes if you want to see the photos, otherwise click No.
But you have to click!Please respond or John may think you said no 🙁
Here’s what it looked like:
I thought this site was suspicious and should not have clicked on the link, but I was curious and – let’s face it – I love documenting the rogues of the Internet. So, to find out about this Tagged site, I opened up a browser window and typed in “www.tagged.com” and signed up for an account.
Don’t sign up for an account. Whatever you do. I began by entering my first and last name, email address, password, and zip code. All of that seemed innocuous enough. It was the next page that made me think “scam.” Tagged proceeded to ask me to enter my Gmail user ID and password.
Unless you’ve been under a rock, you should already know to never, ever, ever, enter the userid and password of your email account (or any other account) into a site not run by your email provider. This makes all your emails, address book contacts – everything – open to inspection by Tagged. I’ve read on other web sites that Tagged uses these to spam all of your friends into joining Tagged, totally without your knowledge and using your email account to do it! This makes it almost impossible for you to block these Tagged emails with your standard mail filters, because if you try to block a Tagged spam masquerading as a friend’s email, you can wind up inadvertently blocking legitimate emails from your friend.
Tagged then asked for my address, home telephone number, and mobile number. Not happy with entering this information, I entered “123 Main St.” and “919-555-1212” for my home number. Tagged flagged these as bogus and requested my REAL information. Fine, I changed it to “123 Poplar Ave.” and “919-626-3764” – a made-up home number.
This got me past the filter, but I left my mobile number blank. I was then presented with an almost never-ending series of screens demanding I enter my mobile number. I must have pressed “Skip” a half-dozen times. The previous page didn’t indicate a mobile number was a requirement but Tagged behaved like a petulant little child when I refused it.
Then Tagged a few marketing screens popped up, asking me totally bizarre questions such as “do you like fishing?” I frankly ignored the content of most of them, too flabbergasted at this point to believe what I was seeing.
Finally, when I was done with this ridiculous registration, I was presented with a page that looked remarkably similar to other social media sites to the point that Tagged could get sued for copping their look and feel. Through a search box, I found the friend who sent me the email. For some strange reason, a number of other search hits were returned, some of them showing what looked like exotic dancers or escorts. Clicking on my friend’s photo, I was taken to his page where among the friends listed were, surprisingly, a bunch more ladies of questionable repute. Now I don’t know a ton about my the guy we rented the condo from, but it would seriously surprise me if this is the kind of company he keeps.
To put it mildly, this was one of the most unusual, invasive, jaw-droppingly bizarre so-called social media sites I’ve ever experienced. Avoid it like the plague, and promptly delete any emails you get with the subject “