Classmates.com gets sued for phony come-ons

If you've never received Classmates.com's spam messages -- "A former classmate of yours is looking for you!" -- you probably don't have a working email account. Classmates.com's come-ons are some of the most venerable and virulent email advertisements around. And at long last the company is being sued because, you know, no one is really looking for anyone using Classmates at all.

Having never heard of Facebook, a San Diego man named Anthony Michaels paid $15 for Classmates' premium service after being told that old school buddies wanted to get back in touch with him. Was it his secret crush? No, Michaels soon found out. In fact, no one he'd gone to school with had ever searched for him.

Michaels' attorneys are looking for class action status to represent what could be hundreds of thousands of similarly scammed individuals and millions of dollars extracted from wallets.

Classmates began its aggravating existence back in 1995 and remains a major online advertiser: Wired notes it spent $30 million alone in 2005 on web ads. For its efforts, the company now claims 40 million registered users; premium subscribers are billed $15 per quarter to maintain their sad and lonely hopes that someone, anyone, from their past may actually want to talk to them. You can read just a few of the complaints about the service here.

Astute readers may also recall the case of Reunion.com, which was accused of spamming users earlier this summer and has now also drawn legal fire.

See Also: JR Raphael's "5 Reasons I Hope Classmates.com Gets Sued Into Oblivion"