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Classmates.com Settles Lawsuit Over Phony Friends
Hugh Pickens writes "Techflash reports that Classmates.com has agreed to pay up to $9.5 million to its users to settle a lawsuit that accused the social network of sending deceptive emails that made people believe their old friends from high school were reaching out to connect — only to discover, after paying for a membership, that their long-lost buddies were nowhere to be found. Lawyers for the plaintiffs asserted that Classmates had 'profited tremendously from their false or deceptive e-mail subject lines and related marketing tactics.' Under terms of the proposed settlement, Classmates.com members who upgraded to premium memberships after receiving one of the 'guestbook' emails will be able to choose either a $3 cash payout or a $2 credit toward the future purchase or renewal of a Classmates.com membership. Classmates.com is also among companies that have come under scrutiny for their use of 'post-transaction marketing' tactics — in which customers are given additional offers as part of the online payment process, sometimes in such a way that they aren't aware they're also signing up to pay more. A November 2009 US Senate Committee report said Classmates made more than $70 million through its relationship with post-transaction marketing firms. The Classmates Media unit posted $58.8 million in operating profit for 2009, up more than 24 percent from the previous year, making Classmates 'the most profitable social network in the world,' according to CEO Mark Goldston."
I've experienced something very similar with a genealogy site in the UK. I signed up to have a look (in the course of which I gave them my name, date of birth and town of birth) and a little later I received an e-mail saying that I was probably in someone else's family tree - all the details which I'd given matched, plus they'd added the hospital in which I was born. It's a sufficiently small hospital that there couldn't have been two people with the same name born there on precisely the same day. And yet I know my family tree very well and there's no way the person purporting to have me in her tree could actually be related.
Sure enough, when I tried to get more details they wouldn't give any details unless I paid, and then after I'd searched a few times the purported relative disappeared from their hits.
The extra information is exactly what they could have got from the register of births marriages and deaths. It was enough to make me cancel my whole subscription.
Japanesepod101.com and other language learning websites run by Innovative Language Learning also practice similarly deceptive marketing.
They offer a 'free trial', access for a month to their language learning website and then persuade you to give them your credit card details so that they can send you a 'free gift' (you only pay for the postage). However if you do this, you have just signed up to their subscription which will begin automatically charging your credit card and renewing your subscription every month ones the free trial is over. To opt-out you need to follow the websites instructions which tell you where to stop the renewal. However this only works after you have singed up again to one of their paid accounts, giving you access to the actual menu under which the opt-out is ... or you can just send their sales department an email and get the automatic subcription terminated.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Obviously you have never been to Alabama.
CM.COM: "OK, so we tried to fraudulently obtain money from you by lieing our asses off about your buddy trying to contact you. Here's lunch. Better now?"
Me: Shove that lunch up your ass!
Why is it that Company X defrauds someone and they only have to pay back 33% of what they collected to the victim; but, if Joe Schmo does it he gets ~1yr jail time or some such judicial or civil penalty?