Really, Quechup is a genuine social network. But the way it acquires new members is questionable at best.

The blogosphere is a-buzz! If you get an invitation from a friend inviting you to join a social networking site called Quechup, delete it. Joining up and clicking ‘yes’ at a critical point in the process could result in the site spamming everyone in your address book, in your name.

It starts out like signing up for any other social network. When you accept an invitation and sign up, it asks you if you’d like to find other people you know who may already be signed up by scanning your Web-based e-mail accounts. Twitter and Facebook both do this too, but Quechup goes one step further. Instead of just letting YOU know who is on the service or not, and giving you the option to invite those you think may be interested, it spams everyone it finds. Without warning or user interaction, it automatically sends an e-mail invitation to everyone in your address book, which looks as though it came from you. Matt Skaggs, from Skullring.org describes:

Little did I know, the damned thing spammed every single contact I had, from work associates, to friends, to relatives, to even people I don’t recall ever meeting. Every single one of them received an invite supposedly from me to join this service.

He posted an update later that day stating that in trying to warn people about the SPAM, Google ended up suspending his gmail account and accused HIM of being the spammer. Yikes!

This is no way to win new users, and any site resorting to these types of guerilla marketing is suspect in my book for sure. Avoid!

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 12:02 pm under Spam.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Ema Kwiatkowski.
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