I have been receiving spam from Classmates.com proclaiming that I have long lost friends I can re connect with via the site since before I graduated high school and aside from my initial curiosity about whether those people still receive royalties (they don’t they were previous employees) the only thing that has peaked my intrest about Classmates.com is how it continues to exist.

Anyway with classmates.com investing 30 million dollars in 2005 on advertising how is it exactly that I do not know anyone who has signed up for it? Well it turns out that despite that fact that I got there emails when I was 13 they actually mean to target graduate students who back in 97 would have been a fair age, in fact of the age that facebook (a service far superior to classmates.com) does not really attract and therefore people I don’t know.

Classmates.com also seems to attract the type of people are are not very internet savy, as you would have to be to have not heard of facebook, and non internet savvy people are often easily tricked when it comes to doing business on the internet.

This makes it incredibly easy for Classmates.com to deploy their shady and unethical business tactics. The scam is actually pretty simple: charge a vast amount of people (about 40 million) relatively small increments of money every three months.

Lets do some math:
40 people paying 15 dollars every month = $600
40 people paying 15 dollars 3 times a year = $18000

Ad a bunch of zero’s to the above number and you get an idea of what Classmates.com could make under ideal situations, the final amount is crazy and I doubt they make that, however there even under non ideal conditions conditions (they have a number of registered complaints against them for false advertising and all around poor business ethics) to be able to afford to invest 40 million a year into advertising they have to be turning some sort of a profit.

They do this by making there site hard to leave as evident by this image.

And by having a registration system that is essentially a trap, with a faulty auto renewal system which continues to bill you even after you have left the site and after your credit card has expired (they keep the number and change the date). This means that you have to scour the internet to locate the notoriously hard to find their notoriously hard to find customer service number and call them so they stop picking your pocket.

Now knowing all this, and knowing how easily I came across all this information, I can only wonder how much longer Classmates.com will continue to be around. Seeing as how 40 million credit cards take a lot longer to expire than 40 million people. The internet is a very crazy place that makes undeserving people very wealthy.

Wish I was one.