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Classmates.com Sued After Guy Realizes His Classmates Weren't Really Looking For Him
from the that-would-be-called-false-advertising dept
You may recall that Classmates.com was a website that first showed up in the 90s, and tried to do what Friendster and Facebook were later able to do. The problem was that Classmates.com's business model was to charge users for many of its features, including actually connecting with and contacting your classmates -- things that more recent social networks have always allowed for free. However, if you ever used Classmates.com for anything, you've probably been spammed with emails for years, each one claiming that your classmates are looking for you, or had recently viewed your profile. Nearly every email sent by the company (and they seem to come about once a week) has some enticing subject line that tries to suggest that something is happening with your profile and you're missing out if you don't upgrade to a premium account.
I've always ignored these emails, figuring that if any of my former high school classmates really wants to contact me, there are plenty of ways to do so that don't require me to pay up -- and naturally assumed that Classmates.com was exaggerating what was happening on the site. Some folks, however, believed the emails and upgraded. And, now, one of those who upgraded his account to see which classmates were trying to contact him, discovered (surprise, surprise) that Classmates.com was lying to him. His classmates weren't trying to contact him via the site, and so he's now suing the company for deceptive advertising, and demanding that the company refund subscription fees for everyone who was similarly duped.
Reader Comments (rss)
(Flattened / Threaded)
Some singles sites do this as well (match.com is the exception, they are legit). Sign up for a free account and put up a profile. Less than an hour later your inbox is getting bombed with "interested parties" which turns out to be the site itself trying to get you to sign up for a paid account.
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Re:
I too can attest that Match.com (and their sister site Chemistry.com) don't falsely inform you of an "interested party."
Of course that by no means actually means the person will pay attention and notice you noticed them right back!
Myspace.com does this as well, saying there are "new friend requests" and there will be "0 new requests" and a giant ad for Match.com though...
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The IQ Question Thingy
One of the irritating come-ons is the IQ question. I answered it for the novelty. The next screen was the come-on and they never even disclosed if I answered the question correctly or not. I have been a basket case ever since.
Like the poll "Which Internet Concern Worries You The Most?" Maybe TechDirt,as a novelty feature, could have a wall-of-shame poll for the most irritating disingenuous adds.
Now if we can rid ourselves of those pesky Netflix ads.
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Is this site even relevant anymore?
With sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, is this site even relevant anymore? I was able to get back in touch with my classmates (the ones I liked anyway) though facebook and it was easy, and more importantly, free.
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Finally, someone does this...
High time someone finally decided to take that site to court. But as Matt says, does anyone even bother with Classmates.com anymore? I don't even see their messages anymore, having blocked them out as spammers, and with practically everyone (but not their pets or imaginary friends) on Facebook anyway, for free, I can't imagine anyone but the most weak-minded actually putting any time and effort into that site.
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No love lost
I signed up for a "free" account at Classmates.com years ago, but I very quickly decided I wouldn't spend a lot of time on that site when I discovered how many of their features were locked away if your account was only free and not paid. Not to mention the popups. I'm married, and I'm reasonably sure I entered that on my profile, yet I kept getting hit with popups encouraging me to join the Classmates Dating site.
I've gotten emails saying someone has signed my Classmates guestbook, but guess what? You have to pay to see who signed it. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that the "mystery signer" is really Classmates.com itself, congratulating me on signing up for the service.
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Re: Re:
never had that happen with Myspace.
there are people who create spam accounts to get you to check out their porn site though.
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Other problems
I had a similar run in with Roommates.com
I was looking for a roommate, they would send me e-mail's almost daily about new mail. Finally I paid up (I was desperate for a roommate) and found that about 3/4 of the "mail" wasn't even there and the rest was from some scammer. Maybe I should think about suing.
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Good Luck!
I hope he wins, I hate companies that use deceptive practices... I hope it costs them plenty.
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I did some contract work for a site like this but was geared more for the adult contact genre. The system had an automated reply/contact system (via cron) that batch processed replies and letters from "interested parties" late at night, and the owners even hired a girl to reply to the hundreds of first contact letters from all the men that sent them (the system had a male/female subscriber ratio of roughly 1000 to 1 or so.)
I remember them sitting around laughing in surprise as they read a letter from a pair of subscribers who had actually met on this system and ended up getting married.
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Re: Re: Re:
I agree with this. This is a great site to have a discussion. How fun. I also love taking pictures. Do you want to see my pictures that Techdirt wouldn't allow on the site? Click here-->just kidding :)
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roomates.com
@noah i've actually successfully used roomates.com a couple of times. though the first time I did receive a couple sign back up emails a few months later... but this last time, no contact after I clossed out my acct.
As to the email notifications, dunno if they get nuked after the other party closes their acct, so that may have been it.
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Classmates
Good for him....Classmates has always been a pain in the @ss with spam and always trying to get "upgrades" for $2.67/day....
PLUS, there is a ton of advertising on the site and pop-ups, etc....why should I pay to see ads?
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I get email weekly saying someone signed my guestbook on Classmates. Though tempted to payup and have a looksee I suspected something was up
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I say the scam
I saw the scam back when it first came out.
Plus like I was not popular in high school and I know it was bull.
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Accountability and Advertising
“The most powerful element in advertising is the truth” - unfortunately, when you have a sucky product it's hard to tell the truth.
Let's hope the courts give Classmates.com a lesson in the value of authenticity in advertising.
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Re: Re:
I wouldn't be so sure about Match.com being totally legit. That said, I do have friends who are happily married after meeting on the site. Years ago I had an unpaid account on Match.com, after a while I got a fairly detailed email of interest from a young match in my area. I broke down and signed up for a paid membership only to find out that the account I got the initial message from was no longer a valid account.
Now there is no way for me to say what really happened, but I thought to myself, what a great little scam they have going there.
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Deception
I was about to say that this guy is whacked in the head for suing a service for not delivering, when there's no way they can control who does or doesn't use the service. However, if they told him that somebody was trying to contact him in order to get him to upgrade, and there really wasn't anybody, then yes, they deserve to be sued, because they outright lied. That's false advertising, plain and simple.
I would hate to see a company I own (and I don't own any companies, for the record) go under due to the competition being better than me, but I would never attempt to use false advertising to try to support a failing business plan. Not only is it morally and ethically wrong, but somebody's bound to figure it out sooner or later, and when they do, your reputation goes right into the sewer, which is clearly what's happening here.
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they got me
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I believe the legal term is fraud in the inducement. If the seller presents you information that influences your decision to buy and that information is false or misleading then you have grounds to sue. I hope the case gets class action status and Classmates.com get sued into oblivion.
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I hope this is successful and affects other scam companies
I also really get pissed off by all the "ZOMG you're visitor #1949241 and you won an iPod!" or "You have *3* new messages. Click here to see them now!"
There's a difference between lame boasting which technically isn't provably lying, and claims which are blatantly false. The latter should be forbidden and punished.
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Funny. I signed up for a free account with Classmatescom, and this was 8 or 10 years ago. Ever since then, email from the company comes to one of my junk email accounts - a free Yahoo email account that I've always kept open.
It's impossible for the emails they send me to be legit, since I'm registered using my married name, and a school I attended once in my life for about 3 months. Nobody's looking for me based on the parameters I entered into the Classmates.com system, but they still taunt me with false emails that can't possibly be true.
I think it's really stupid to sue a company for something like this. Who cares? Get a life.
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Re: Is this site even relevant anymore?
probably not, but as mentioned in previous posts this case has implications on any site (personals, roommate finders, etc...) that charge people to connect with each other and fraudulently entices them to do so.
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Same here, facebook hasn't been much better
Perhaps it is the year that I graduated, making me and my classmates more curmudgeonly (1985) but I have not found a ton of my former friends on Facebook. So I suspect that the many emails I have received, particularly in the past 12 months, of folks signing my guestbook are false advertising.
I thought it suspect at the time, but there have been a few times when I have been tempted to pay up just to see who was trying to get in touch. I am hoping my new Facebook profile will be more successful in reaching the one or two friends I can't seem to locate any more. I did find an old crush and she is hotter now than when she declined to go to the amusement park with me @ age 17.
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Re: Re:
MySpace doesn't do that. What happens is you get a friend request by the spammer, then the email goes out to you, then the spammer is caught and their friend request canceled by the time you get to view your request.
I don't agree (and never have) with Classmates.com's strategy, but let's stay on topic, and not drag everyone through the mud here.
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classmate.con
i have received more people contacting me than people in my graduating class
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Re: classmate.con
My experience has been similar. There were 405 people in my graduating class. I KNOW I've received far more emails than that from them. And of the 405, there surely weren't more than 20 or 30 that I would have considered "friends" who would want to contact me now, almost 30 years later!
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Re: The IQ Question Thingy
I'm just glad I haven't seen an X-10 ad in a while!
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Alternative Headline: "High School Loser That Everybody Ignored Sues Classmates.com For Reminding Him That He Is Now A Middle-aged Loser That Everybody Ignores."
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i met my hubby on match.com :) never had any problem with them at all.
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Re: Match.com
Some dating sites even go so far as to put deceptive fake profiles of attractive girls in major cities just to bulster their search results and get you to pay for the subscription and send a message that will never lead to anything. I wonder if they have people to have fake conversations too?
I read a while back about some dating site (I wish I remember which one) actually had models that they would send out on some dates meant to go nowhere just to keep people paying their fees every month. What a scam.
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Re: Re: Match.com
This would be hard to believe without the service being absurdly expensive (think in the range of high-end escorts...) because models being sent out on dates is not something you could sustain on a low paid subscription fee.
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Re: to Carla from cheers
I think it would be funny if you bought a DVD player from a retailer, opened the box, and found a VCR. Then, when you try to take it back, they tell you to get a life.
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Re: Re: Re: Match.com
It is quite sustainable.
Don't forget that most models are not of the $50k+ a catwalk show variety (a la Elle McPherson, Kathie Ireland, Claudia Schiffer etc etc). Most models are of the "hire a pretty waitress for a special event" variety. E.g. opening a new store with free nibbly's served by cute waiter/waitress. Or an instore promotion. Or advertising clothes for a local newspaper or smaller chain stores etc. Most of those (say 95% of the model industry) get on the order of $100-$300/hour.
So, once a month per, say, 1,000 subscribers (@$19.95/month thats $19,950/month), you hire one of these models for a 2-4 hour date (dinner only, movie only, or maybe if real lucky dinner and a movie) ($200-$1200 depending on length of date and price of model). At the end of the date they give a polite "thanks for the nice evening but I'm not interested" response. The person who got the date posts on the site that "had a date with a real hottie, he/she wasn't interested but they do have hotties on this site".
Job done.
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Let's hope the jury isn't a bunch of idiots and wins one for the team!
This is a lawsuit I can easily support. The guy's not out to get millions, but simply a return in fees to everyone.
Kudos. With more lawsuits like this that are legitimate, the more big business may make changes to do the right thing.
Hoping for a win on this one, as it will set precedence for ALL sites doing this!
GO MEAT!
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Keep on Suing
Don't stop there. Go for Reunion.com too. All these sites do is provide fodder for the spammers.
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Not really fond of Classmates
A few years ago I actually had a gold account and use it to successfully contact a few people. Some of us are still in touch. Before my gold membership ended I altered my profile to provide enough hints to people looking for me about a web site that I could be contacted at (the site filters out emails and web site info).
This trick has actually worked well over the years and I haven't paid for a membership since.
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I have a friend from high school who doesn't have a myspace or facebook page, but he does have a profile on classmates so one day I figured I'd pony up for the shortest membership to see if I could get back in touch with him. The guestbook signing thing works like this: If you look at someone's profile it "signs" their guestbook automatically unless you check a box saying you want clasmates.com to remove the signature. So when you get those emails someone did actually go on your page, but there's no guarantee that they were actually trying to get in touch with you and not just seeing if you got fat or divorced or some other curiousity about classmates or that in fact they weren't looking for someone else with the same name as you. I hope he wins.
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Re: No love lost
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RIPPED OFF WITH FAKE VISITORS BY CLASSMATES
Classmates got me too
I intend to sue
DR
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Re: classmates.con
I signed up years ago for the free account only to become highly annoyed by the "you are one step away from (not gold, but insanity)" BS. A few years later, I had a couple of old hometown friends contact me through classmates. I was able to get in touch with them without upgrading. But then my email was bombarded with classmates.con claiming I had several signatures in my guestbook so eventually, I upgraded to see what all the hoopla was about. I discovered that the guestbook isn't a guestbook at all but rather a profile visit where visitors may checkmark a selection that lets me know they visited. That's all. No messages and not even any indication they wanted to write or talk to me.
What I've concluded is that classmates.con is a big marketing scam, a major spammer, and based on recent experiences with my old friends and classmates I've contacted through the site, sometimes there's a good reason why we all go our separate ways, rarely to be seen or heard from again.
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CLASSMATES IS A BIG SCAM AND BLOCK E-MAILS
I RECENTLY WENT ON CLASSMATES.COM JUST TO CHECK IT OUT AND AS SOON AS I ENTERED MY E-MAIL THEY HIGHLIGHT IT AND BLOCK
ALL E-MAILS FROM COMMING TO MY COMPUTER. THEY ON A DAILY BASIS SEND ME E-MAILS SAYING SOMEONE IS LOOKING FOR ME AND
DON'T I WANT TO KNOW WHO? WELL IF I DID DON'T YOU THINK I WOULD PAY FOR IT AND EVEN THOSE WHO ARE PAYING FOR THIS SERVICE ARE BEING BLOCKED FROM SENDING THERE E-MAILS TO THOSE OF US WHO ARE NOT GOING TO SUCKED INTO THIER SCAM!!!!!!!!!!!!! AND IF THEY ARE BLOCKING PAYING CUSTOMERS
E-MAIL HOW THEY GET AWAY WITH THIS I DON'T KNOW. SINCERELY-
NANNETTE O'REILLY
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god i hope classmates.com goes under.
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classmates.com
I have gotten e-mails from classmates.com for a while yet. Any body who would like to contact me knows how to get a hold of me. I usually delete the ones from classmates.com. I received on today 12-29-08 saying 4 people has viewed my profile. there is nothing on my profile to view.
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Classmates
Were my classmates from 1973 looking for me????
I ignored this ad for months....after deciding to click on...I found that my high school admirer was looking for me so as many other including my long time best friend and only friend that I shared my sandwich with WAS looking for me....and since then we have talked by phone and are reuniting.......they really were looking for this shy young lady who thought no one remembered or liked..
Thank you class mates and this is not paid for or a politcal announcemnet for them
it is just a person who people were REALLY looking for!
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I have come to the conclusion that there is a dark side to reunionss. Fine if its a long lost good friend but you may be remembering just the good. If someone wants to find someone they can just do it on their own. I found my friend on google when I ended up with a work assignment in our hometown and we did connect. It was good and bad. He tried to play his old jealousy game with me that he pulled as teenagers but I would have none of it. I ended our reunion and left town after my work project was done.
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Misleading and just wrong!!
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classmates.com
I subscribed, thinking this would be a help to me. However, after realizing this to be a scam, I requested cancellation of my membership and refund of my money. Have had no response. Can you help me in getting a refund?
Thanks!
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Tricked by Classmates.com
I am very furious with the trickiness which the classmates.com lures to into their website and can't really do what they say they can...not true and they keep billing for things that you did not even asked for...watch out for them...and you try to get into their website you to get information and you can't even get there because of upgrading but they are still charging you for things they have not done to you...
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classmates.com
I've come in contact with one friend and actually exchanged emails with her, but quite honestly I hate classmates.com. They should show you who "signed" your guest book and if you want to contact them then charge for that. They try to hook you and once they have you, you're there for recurring payments unless you remember to cancel.
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framed by classmates!
I had a narcissistic ex-best friend spread rumors that I made a fake classmates profile of her and was emailing all her classmates and that I had paid $40 some-odd dollars to do so. Clearly, I had nothing to do with that and think it is funny that perhaps these classmates were getting messages saying this person was trying to contact them when it was really classmates.com sending the messages and I was being blamed for it!!
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Re: them
they stole over 20000million peploes money & never let QUALXSERV DO ANY WORK ON YOR HARDDRIVE
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classmates being sued
Thats awsome news.I just got my first computer and was thinking about going there because my friend did it 4 me once and I Thought it was so cool.I am suspisious like dude though and think most sites out there are doing the same shit.THANKS
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Classmates.com is a rip-off
I think its even worse now. I took the "someone signed your guestbook" bait and bought a $29.00 Gold membership. But apparently the person who "signed" my guestbook only visited my profile. So when I signed into my guestbook, they received an email that "someone signed" their "guestbook". Subsequently, they paid the $29.00 to discover that I was the person who signed their guestbook...... but I never did. I only visited their profile. So Classmates duped both me and my old friend into paying memberships resulting from activity that should have been annonymous. Classmates.com is obsolete and hopefully the judge shuts them down.
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classmates.com
this company riped me off saying that someone from school had sent me a email to read it i needed to join, i did for $17.00 for 4 months my card was charged twice that day. now i want to be removed from the site do not want to be charged anymore to keep my account the trouble is they wont show you on the site how to discontinue my subscription this really tees me off. i guess i will have to cancel my card and get a new one issued. they should be shut down they know they rip the public off. if anyones knows a way to cancel this crap let me know. thanks
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Charges from classmates
How can I get on board with the suit? I can not get them to stop charging my account.
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RIPPED OFF
I joined classmates.com and joined the Gold membership and now I cant get anyone on the site and they took my money.Please contact by e mail and let me know whats going on,if you know. THANK YOU Connie Nitterright Ballew
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Re: Fraud
You are RIGHT !
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CLASSMATES.COM IS A SCAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! DO NOT JOIN AND CERTAINLY DON'T PAY THEM ANYTHING!!!! THEY AUTOMATICALLY RENEW YOUR MEMEBERSHIP WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION.I AGREED TO PAY ONE FEE AND NOW THEY KEEP CHARGING MY CARD!!!!
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renewed membership without mt permission
CLASSMATES.COM IS A SCAM!!!! i just found another 15.00 taken out of my bank account without my permission.what can we do to get them shut down? does anyone know how to cancel this membership? if so let me know please. i am on a fixed income and cant afford this. i am going to report this to ripoff reports.com
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Classmates.com
I agree they're always sending me "alerts" that so and so was trying to contact me'',or see who signed your guestbook this week-only to discover that I can go on a singles cruise. There is always an attempt to get you to spend more money. I got in touch w/ a few of my friends from high school-but I'm much more satisfied w/ Facebook and it's free!
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Classmates.com
I agree they're always sending me "alerts" that so and so was trying to contact me'',or see who signed your guestbook this week-only to discover that I can go on a singles cruise. There is always an attempt to get you to spend more money. I got in touch w/ a few of my friends from high school-but I'm much more satisfied w/ Facebook and it's free!
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How to stop E-mail from classmates.com
I have been trying to stop the E-mail from classmates.com for quite a while and still receive it. Some times it even causes problems with my computer. Any hints? Jackie
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To exit from classmates.com
I'm sorry, I have to go now.It wasn't workable. I can't trust them. Thank you!
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First thought is always right
I just got scammed today. Thank God it was only for 15 dollars. When I signed up for the free membership I too started receiving alot of emails saying someone is looking for me or signed my guestbook. Since I signed others that I knew I believed it was them trying to get in touch with me. My first thought is this is a scam. Who goes on Classmates.com that often for me to receive emails that quickly. I kept telling myself not to do it but I am desperately searching for my best friend in high school so I took the chance.....and lost! Of course, none of the people that signed my guestbook have names that are even vaguely familiar. And, not surprisingly, none of them had pictures or even information up on their profiles. This was so very bogus! I guess if they get enough people like me just dropping 15 dollars they really don't care if it is real or not. I could have eaten breakfast all week at work for $15. Hopefully, there will be some kind of class action suit or something. Count me in!
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