Well, it’s official. The Washington Attorney General is one of the first government entities to do more than yell about post transaction marketing scams like the ones we’ve been writing about at Intelius for years now.
A Consent Decree filed in the King County Superior Court in Washington requires the payment of $1.3 million in fines by Intelius. And they’re also restricted from engaging in some… → Read More
Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna’s office sent out a media advisory that they’ll announce a “major settlement with Internet company” tomorrow. Says the advisory : “The Washington Attorney General’s Office estimates millions of dollars have been deceptively obtained from Washington consumers by an Internet sales method known as post-transaction marketing. Attorney General Rob McKenna will… → Read More
Intelius, a site that helps users find information about others, continues to have more bad news around its senior execs. John Arnold, a cofounder and EVP, has been indicted on a charge of lying to a grand jury about having sex with a dancer.
The company has been trying to go public despite hundreds of scam complaints, and the atrocious legal record of CEO Naveen Jain. We covered many of the… → Read More
The types of marketing offers (we refer to them more descriptively as scams) that have plagued ecommerce sites like Intelius are now facing U.S. government scrutiny. These scams are kissing cousins to the Scamville social gaming offers that we’ve written about recently.
Next week the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will hold a full committee hearing on Aggressive… → Read More
Intelius is trying to dip its toes into the public market again. Last year we wrote about their business, which combined for-pay people search information with a post transaction marketing scam. After purchasing people information, users were encouraged to take a survey for $10 cash back. In reality, if users clicked yes the $10 was never mentioned again and they were signed up for a nearly… → Read More
I knew the glory days of Friendster were behind them, but I didn’t know things were this bad. The company is proudly announcing a partnership with Washington based people search company Intelius this evening. The goal, they say, is “to provide a more robust and comprehensive user search experience on Friendster and to power people searches originating on Friendster with results from across the… → Read More
There’s really no excuse for going on a date in this day and age without knowing anything about the person — even if they’re a complete stranger. With so much information available about people online whether through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, or the like, it’s relatively easy to find out way more information than you probably want to know. And now there’s an app for that.
DateCheck… → Read More
People search engine Spock is about to be sold, say multiple sources. Spock was a hot startup back when it launched in 2007, but after an initial spike in traffic, the company has gone sideways and faded into obscurity. People search, it seems, will be dominated by the likes of LinkedIn and Facebook, who are both now being smart about search engine optimization.
Now they’ve burned through much of… → Read More
A year ago we wrote about Naveen Jain’s current startup, Intelius. Jain left previous the company he founded, InfoSpace, in disgrace in late 2002 after violating insider trading laws and other sketchy activities. After leaving InfoSpace Jain started Intelius, across the street from his old offices in Bellevue, Washington.
In that post we outlined how Intelius, at the time in the process of… → Read More
When serial entrepreneur Naveen Jain left the company he founded, InfoSpace, in disgrace in late 2002, a lot of people thought he would never be trusted by the financial markets again (see this three part series from the Seattle Times that talks extensively about the rise and fall of Jain at Infospace and details his violations of insider trading laws). At its height Infospace was worth $31… → Read More
[photopress:intelius.jpg,full,center] He could be looking up your info! There’s a database out there with your name on it. (In it, but on it sounded better.) Intelius collects information like your cellphone number, how much your house worth and so forth and then stuffs it all into a database. This information is gathered from public records. The database can be used by anyone, provided they… → Read More
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