Nationwide Class Action Filed Against DoubleClick

Stanley Ference writes "A nationwide class action lawsuit has been commenced in the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, against DoubleClick Inc. DoubleClick is a leading provider of products and services used by direct marketers, web publishers and advertisers to plan, execute and analyze marketing programs. In 2002, Doubleclick served more than 630 billion ads on the Internet for thousands of customers." If you've ever been tricked by one of those ads telling you that your "connection is not optimized" or that you have "1 new message waiting," you could be part of the class. Read on for details.

Stanley Ference continues: "The class action complaint alleges that DoubleClick deceptively and fraudulently commandeered millions of Internet users to the commercial websites of DoubleClick's customers through dissemination of tens-of-millions of fraudulent Internet advertising banners that impersonated computer system messages. The Complaint states that through use of such Fake User Interface ("FUI") dialogs that fraudulently represented themselves as computer system error messages, DoubleClick tricked millions of Internet users into interrupting the work they were performing to respond to the fraudulent system message, only to unexpectedly find both computer and computer user thus hijacked to commercial websites of DoubleClick's customers.

Additional information about this lawsuit, including an illustration of the advertising banners that are the subject of this lawsuit, may be found at ferencelaw.com/doubleclick."

Here's a link to the press release (PDF) announcing the filing of this lawsuit.

Comments

Re:I see the flaw...

[Natalie's Hot Grits]

You are just not getting your facts straight. To continue with the harry potter idea, most (if not all) businesses that say they have the lowest price in town honor pricematching of local competitors.

You can't just make a blanket statement that they must be lying if they say they have the best deal in town. Because they probably do.

You don't see every bookseller in town making the same claim do you? If not, then your wrong. And I haven't seen many book sellers telling me they have the lowest prices in town.

You have taken an assumption that their advertisement is false, and turned it into "all advertisements are fraudulent" when you didn't even bother to verify if the advertisement at hand is false or not.