Contents: Photos on Tagged | Facebook Tagged photo Photos on Tagged ;)
If you get a message that appears to be from a friend with the Subject:
Someone sent you photos on Tagged :)

DON'T SIGN UP FOR IT

Your friend did not actually send you email or pictures, Tagged generated email to you from their address list automatically.

The email you get looks like this:

If you click "yes" it asks you to Join Free to see the photos.
If you click "no" is asks you to sign up to "not get anymore invites from the person".

After creating an account it gives you the following:

There is a "skip" button is way up at the top right of the page where most people don't notice it.
If you are using another mail service it substitutes that in place of yahoo.
The subterfuge is that it implies it is just checking and then reporting back to you. But in fact it generates emails to all those people on your behalf.

Apparently this site had been around for a while without doing this so was marked as OK, by McAfee and other sites which detect "bad" sites.
Using your address book to generate signups is a technique they copied from Facebook, they just got more sneaky and deceptive with it. I don't know how Facebook got away with it without more bad press.

The signup process also sends you to another site www.smileymedia.com, which tries to get you to sign up for a bunch of cell phone services such as, ringtones, love advice, flirting tips, horoscopes, celebrity squares game, and others, 7 or 8 "You are almost finished" screens in all, and several with fees of $9.99/month.

According to BrainHandles.com/, "Once you've signed up, they'll e-mail you and tell you that you've got a private message from the person who supposedly sent you the photos, though the message is an auto-generated welcome message from them that your friend never wrote.

They send a number of e-mails, even though you request a membership cancellation."

Another user said, "Clicking on my friend's photo, I was taken to his page where among the friends listed were, surprisingly, a bunch more ladies of questionable repute."
I didn't see this on my test.

It does not technically fall into the virus, phishing or scam categories, (because it doesn't install any software on your computer or try to extract money illegally), but the way it spreads contains elements of all.

If you did sign up I'd change my email password. Who knows what else they'd do with it.

Some web sites say you can get in trouble by just opening the email and it will generate porn.
I tried it with a dummy account and it didn't do anything on opening the mail or clicking on the link. You had to sign up then give it your email account password and the picture(s) is sent were ones from a list of stock pictures users are asked to select when they sign up.

According to their web site, the founders, Greg Tseng and Johann Schleier-Smith, claim to be from Stanford after getting degrees from Harvard, ugh!

Tagged has a Better Business Bureau (BBB) rating of F

• Number of complaints filed against business.
• Failure to respond to complaints filed against business.
• BBB does not have sufficient information to determine how long this business has been operating.
• BBB does not have sufficient background information on this business.

See: Tagged at Scopes, it appears to be accurate.

So, how does this work? Basically, a marketer looking to promote something tags a photo with several of their most influential friends' names. Those "friends" aren't necessarily supporting the given cause, they've just had their name hijacked for this purpose. That tagged photo ends up in the news feeds of the friends of those influentials as if it was a photo of them. After people click through to view it, they discover that it's not actually a picture of their friend at all, but a message in support of some cause, product, or service.