I hope all of you know by this time not to fall for any advertising pitch from Classmates.com. Their service can be useful, as we found when we put together our 40th grade school reunion back in 2006. However, I’ve seen a multitude of reports that their constant email come-ons are completely fictional, and (as far as I’m concerned) fraudulent.
Today I got one that I know is a fraud, and I didn’t have to sign up to find out. Ordinarily, the Classmates.com scam works like this: You get an email from Classmates that reads something like, “Someone is trying to find you! Click here to find out who!” You click and find that you have to pay to find out. Fair enough. But as many people have found, once you pay up you find that there’s no one there. Nobody was looking for you. It was a lie, or, as we say when you lie to sell somebody something, fraud.
So today I get the umptieth email from Classmates since my subscription expired, asking me: “Remember Linda Cripps? Newest Class of ’70 Alum!” This is half a hair better than saying that someone was trying to find me; note well that there is no imputed action on the part of Linda Cripps. However, there’s a huge worm in it:
The Lane Technical High School Class of 1970 had no girls in it.
Zero. Zip. Nada. Girls were not even admitted to the school until 1971, and none were graduated from Lane until 1973. So unless we’re in “boy named Sue” territory here, Classmates pulled some poor girl’s name out of its subscribers (or the Chicago phone book, or Facebook, or somewhere else) and told me she was in my graduating class at Lane Tech. (I just checked: There was no one of any gender named “Cripps” in my class, nor any class listed in the 2002 Alumni Directory, nor among the multitude of people I’ve met or dealt with in any way in my life.)
I don’t see anything online as to how the suit is going or whether it was dismissed, but I’ve seen enough reported sleaziness just looking to say, avoid these guys like H1N1. (The Plague is just so 1348…)
