Is Quechup a Big Fat Spammer? Are They Accessing Your Hotmail, AOL, Gmail or Yahoo Address Book? The Answer to at Least One of These is Yes!   9/26/2007 - 2,166 views, 1 Comment

Does the title of this article on Quechup and spam sound familiar? It should, and it’s no accident. Substitute Flixster for Quechup, and you’ll find that we had to write the exact same article about Flixster earlier this year. Both Quechup and Flixster are essentially tricking users into giving them the password to their Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail or AOL account, scraping their address book, and spamming everyone in their Yahoo, Gmail, AOL or Hotmail address book.

Now, to their credit, the CEO of Flixster himself came to the Internet Patrol to defend their actions. That said, we have just tested out the Flixter site just now, and we note that despite their protestations of understanding the issues, they are still pulling the same stuff over at Flixster too.

And here’s what that stuff is:

When you sign up for Quechup, and Flixter, using any of a Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo or Gmail account, as soon as you choose your username and provide your email address, the very next screen looks like this (this is the Quechup screen - the Flixster screen is very similar)…

Do you see how it’s prompting you to provide your Hotmail (or AOL, Yahoo or Gmail) password?

And how it makes it look at least sort of legitimate by using the Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo and Gmail logos?

And do you see how sneaky they are, saying that it’s how you can “find out which of your friends are using Quechup”??

Do you know how you will find out?

Because they are the only friends of yours who won’t be royally ticked off at you for causing Quechup to spam them.

Because as soon as you put in your Hotmail or AOL or Yahoo or Gmail password, Quechup is going to spam your entire address book with the following (for purpose of example, we’re going to assume that your name is Pat Brown):

Pat Brown (pat@hotmail.com) has invited you as a friend on Quechup…
…the social networking platform sweeping the globe

Click here if you do not wish to receive any more emails from Quechup

Isn’t that a lovely little note that they send from..oh..you! Because it’s not bad enough that they scrape your address book - but they also pretend to be you.

That’s right. The email comes “from” pat@hotmail.com

And the subject line is “Invite from Pat Brown (pat@hotmail.com)”

Now here’s the thing. When we busted Flixster for doing this, their CEO said, and we quote, “This is also incredibly common practice around the web - see yelp/facebook/myspace and many others that also offer it. Plaxo actually offers a popular widget to allow any site to offer this feature.”

Does that excuse the practice? Not by any stretch of the imagination.

But would they do it if it didn’t work?

No.

So, what does this mean?

It means that users are giving them their passwords!

Stop it!