Their spam email starts out with: “1567 People Viewed Your Background Report. They could be a potential employer, client, date, government agency or old friend”.
MyLife or MyLife.com is an information brokerage company founded in 2002 as Reunion.com. In addition to that name, it previously conducted business as Wink.com.
MyLife gathers personal information through public records and other sources to automatically generate a “MyLife Public Page” for each person, described by MyLife as a “complete Wikipedia-like biography on every American.
A MyLife Public Page can list a wide variety of personal information, including an individual’s age, past and current home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, employers, education, photographs, relatives, political affiliations, a mini biography and a personal review section which encourages other MyLife members to rate each other. MyLife claims to have over 225 million Public Pages with information about almost everyone in America, 18 years old and over.
According to MyLife, a Public Page cannot be deleted and only premium (paid) members can hide content on their Public Page and remove the info from the original source. The site also allows people to search for any person in the United States, read their auto-generated public page, and review them.
There are many, many negative reviews on this company mostly based on their spam marketing tactics and for the unfortunate few who have “signed up”, ultimately having great difficulty getting their information removed or hidden and having their credit card account deleted.
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/online/mylife.html
Some history on My Life over the past decade: In 2008, classmates.com was involved in a class-action lawsuit for sending spam emails to people claiming there was “someone looking for them” and then charging a fee to view the information, only to discover there was nobody searching for them; a subsequent 2011 lawsuit against MyLife stated that the company was engaging in the same practices and was simply a rebranded classmates.com. The suit also accused the company of false solicitation by offering monthly memberships and then charging member’s credit cards at the annual rate.[14] The class action also accused MyLife of spamming contacts improperly gathered from the address books of those visiting the site. U.S. District Judge Claudia Wilken ruled to consolidate the 2011 class-action lawsuit with two other fraud class actions against MyLife. The lawsuit was ultimately dismissed when classmates.com agreed to pay a more than $9.5 million settlement.
The Washington State Attorney General’s Office also began an investigation in 2011 stemming from concerns that the company’s TV advertisements may have violated the state’s Consumer Protection Act, which prohibits unfair and deceptive practice. According to State officials the company resolved the issue by making an “assurance of discontinuance” and paid $28,000 in attorneys’ costs and fees.
In 2015, after a joint investigation by the Santa Monica City Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, the company was again sued, this time for allegedly violating California Anti-Spam law. Investigators found that MyLife was tricking consumers into giving the company their personal identifying information, and later their money, through false and misleading ads. MyLife agreed to a court judgment under which it would pay $800,000 in penalties, plus $250,000 in refunds to customers, a ruling referred to as “the first major prosecution of an online business for violations of California’s automatic renewal law”. The company also is subject to a permanent injunction that prohibits false advertising and unauthorized credit card charges.
The Better Business Bureau (BBB) has revoked MyLife’s accreditation, initially giving MyLife a rating of D-, and later an F, stating On March 20, 2015 this company’s accreditation in BBB was revoked by BBB’s Board of Directors due to recent government action involving the business’s customer relations which indicates a significant failure of the business to meet standards of conduct expected of a BBB member.
Unfortunately – they’re still operating and spamming potential victims today. If you get an email stating that thousands of people have viewed your personal information report simply delete it and block the sender. You don’t want to go down that rabbit hole.
Just an FYI – I went through their online “application” process to see what might happen only to find that – as usual – you never get something for nothing. Once you spend 15 minutes running what looks like dozens of data searches with all the pretty graphs and processing bars filling in and changing colors you finally get to the page where the results are presented – EXCEPT – this is the point where you must provide a credit card and select your “plan”. If you sit on the plan page long enough without taking action, the pricing actually changes and offers you a 20% discount – With the discount, the minimum investment is $13.56 per month but they want you to sign up for their “best plan” and commit to 1 full year of searches.
They also provide an 800 number for their Customer Care Team in case you’re dissatisfied. I called the number, followed the prompts and was finally connected to an individual – unfortunately the language barrier was such that I was not able to discern my next steps.
All I can say is BEWARE !!!!!
