It’s not uncommon for people that get caught red-handed to point the finger too, when they get the opportunity. At least that’s what seems to be the case with Tagged.com. In this case, the tattling did work in favor of Tagged, winning $200k in its lawsuit against Erik Vogeler. Having sued Vogeler for spamming users of the second-tier social network, Tagged came out on top this time.
Vogeler was found guilty of sending 6,079 members of Tagged unsolicited messages including links to an adult dating website. The U.S. District Court Judge in the northern district of California ruled in favor of Tagged, awarding the network $25 per violation. That totaled to just under $152k, with the additional ruling for Vogeler to pay Tagged $50k in attorneys’ fees rounding out the sum owed to Tagged.
So what have we learned? It doesn’t pay to spam a spammer. While Tagged has faced lawsuits of its own for sending out questionable bulk mail since launching a few years back, it looks as though Tagged has learned a few things. Co-founded by Greg Tseng, who was also the co-founder and CEO of Internet startup incubator Jumpstart Technologies, has already been involved with multiple lawsuits pertaining to spam behavior.
Jumpstart Technologies was fined nearly $1 million in 2006 for alleged violations of the CAN-SPAM Act, which was the largest penalty for illegal spam at the time of ruling, reports TechCrunch. and just last autumn, Tagged settled another court case with Texas and the New York Attorney General for spamming its own users.
In many ways, it seems as though Tagged is getting a pretty bad rap. It’s easy to find spammy behavior on most social networks out there, big and small. Sometimes the spam comes from the networks themselves, other times it comes from sneaky users trying to get over on us. Either way, it’s an expected part of navigating the world of online social networking.
Yet the level of inappropriate activity taking place through Tagged was enough to catch the attention of many privacy and anti-spam advocates, calling Tagged out on multiple occasions for its questionable practices. For every major social network that has been blessed with a large number of users, they’ve also been cursed with spammers. MySpace, Facebook and others have taken it upon themselves to make examples out of these spamming users, and it looks as though Tagged is taking this same approach.
Often used as a warning to others thinking of spamming users on their sites, these “example” lawsuits are also meant to discourage spammers all together. Whether or not it will work for Tagged remains to be seen, but Tagged may be looking for additional validation of its social network by punishing spammers that use its site. nevertheless, Tagged will likely need to do a little more than that to change its image.