Run for the hills… Keep your address book safe!

by Vanessa Wood, Design to Spec LLC – Website Design

Sunday started off peaceful enough. I sat down with a cup of coffee to check my personal email. There was an email with the name of someone I know, inviting me to look at photos on tagged.com (by the way, you’ll notice I’m not going to link to their site anywhere in this article… I don’t want to boost them in Google even by a fraction!).  I had more email to answer, so I put off the photo thing for a few minutes.

By the time I was ready to look at it again there was another email from another friend asking that I join tagged.com.  Since I had recently been at an event with these two friends and photos were taken, the email sounded legit enough. But with any email, no matter how innocuous, your should follow the rules for safety on the Internet. These will help you from getting tagged!

RULE #1: NEVER CLICK ON A LINK IN AN EMAIL. I typed the website address in to the browser and looked at it to be sure a site even existed.  The tagged.com email is pretty clever… it gives you an option to click “yes” or “no thanks.”  NEVER click to accept or reject an offer!

RULE #2: DON’T DISCLOSE ID INFORMATION THOUGH EMAIL OR ON UNFAMILIAR WEBSITES.
While it looks like Facebook and other networking websites. It’s not like them. To register they want personal information. You know, the kind of stuff that sends up red flags and blows whistles. They wanted dates of birth and parts of social security numbers.

I tried to finish signing up without giving further info. I couldn’t and couldn’t see any photos, so I stopped right there. WHOA!

RULE #3: IN DOUBT? CHECK IT OUT.
If you think the email sent to you by a bank may be fake, do a search online for the bank’s website and look to see if any email fraud warnings are posted. If it makes you feel better, call their customer service number on their website and report the fake email. Recently I was expecting a delivery from DHL and got an email that could have been phishing or could have been real (it was written pretty convincingly). When I checked the DHL site there was already a warning posted.

RULE #4: VET THEM THRU INDEPENDENT SOURCES. When I Googled tagged.com the description in the search results looked positive, describing the  site’s founding by a team of Harvard graduates.  When you take the 2 seconds to click through and read Wikipedia, the first paragraph makes it clear that consumer advocates are alarmed about this site and that the Better Business Bureau has given them an “F”. It’s amazing what you can find if you take a couple minutes to look for it.

So what does this site do? The evil is in the request to access your address book.  Wikipedia describes what happens next: “Once a user receives an email inviting them to “see photos”, the email address is recorded and they are deluged with spam from other companies.”

The end of my story? Well, I contacted my friend who allegedly “friended” me on tagged.com. I got a very nice apology because they didn’t “friend” me, didn’t put up any photos, and of course, didn’t send an invitation to everyone in their address book.  Shame on tagged. Do you think the site founders learned this at Harvard?

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