False email ads on the rise

Shruti Singhal, a registered user on several social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut and Fropper, was surprised when she started receiving mails from networking sites like Classmates.com and Jhoos, asking her to join them to meet her friends. She says: “I thought it was spam as my friends never sent me any invite to any of these dating sites.”

Singhal was merely a victim of false advertising or false email alerts which are sent to unsuspecting netizens, urging them to join social networking sites like Ryze, Linkedin, Jhoos, Friendster, Bebo and BigAdda.

Recently, Classmates.com — another such networking site — was sued by one of its registered user who was duped into paying money to upgrade his membership in order to connect with old friends. In order to see who has been looking at your profile and read messages from other members, users must first upgrade to a gold membership.

Most leading Indian social networking sites (SNS) sites deny undertaking any such marketing exercise to make money. Nikhil Soman, chief technology officer, BigAdda says, “Only registered users can send invites to their contacts to join into BigAdda and if some of the invitees still do not join, the same registered users can send reminders to them.

By virtue of our 3 million registered user base, we have access to a huge database but as a policy we never make use of it.” From time to time BigAdda undertakes marketing activities like television commercials, print advertising, outdoor advertising and on-ground promotions, to promote itself to prospective users.

India is also witnessing the advent of niche networking sites on movies, music, IT and even business networking. One such is People’s Group’s Fropper.com that describes itself as a social networking and dating site. According to the site’s business head, Navin Mittal, “Classmates.com has clearly crossed the line by misleading the user.”