No doubt the terms suck. I mean, it's based on how much total revenues google has made off of you so far, like the example in the email, if you've given google 1% of their total revenues since 2002, then you'll get 1% of the 60 mill left over after the lawyers' cuts (30 mill for a settlement? Jesus). That means that if you've spent 6 million on Adwords, you'll get 0.1% of the 60 million (if that $6 billion is correct) which will be a credit of $6000 towards your Adwords ads. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but this whole thing just screams WRONG anyway (and damn, Google has some good lawyers to have scored this settlement). I'd really like to know how they got my email address too. If Google supplied them with all our addresses (which seems the most likely right?) then now this email marketing company has this list... This email marketing company (from which the spam originated) doesn't have any kind of contact email, but does have a phone number. Anyone wanna call them? xmr3.com.
what this email fails to say is that if enough people opt out then the class action law suit becomes null and void. The judge that ruled in this case basically left it up to the plantifs (us) whether to accept or not. If enough opt out then google dont need to pay out and the lawyers dont win leaving room for other bigger lawsuits to follow. The downside of this lawsuit becoming void is that future lawsuits will think twice about proceeding because of this first loss. But i believe the pending on in california are willing to go on if this first lawsuit fails. They believe, like i do, that 90million isnt enough!! Anyway each to there own, im still opting out!
What I don't understand is - why should I have to opt-out of something, and why is it assumed I'm 'in' if I don't reply or pay this any mind? That is rediculous. I couldn't give an arse what happens and the fact I haven't been given a choice to opt-in to the suit and then recieve the information is appauling. Shouldn't it work the other way around? You must OPT-IN and if you don't then it's assumed you aren't bothered and therfore you aren't in the suit. Why does it work the other way round? It's moronic and to be honest it's unfair to Google to automatically opt-in every advertiser and tell them via an e-mail what may or may not be spam to opt-out.. and then their website doesn't even work so you can't opt out anyway. What is this crap. Honestly. Pete
I do not see how this can be anything other than authentic - there has been nobody on this thread saying they got the email but have never used ad words. The letter and the PDF file are in authentic sounding legalese - most phishing letters cannot even sound like Ebay. 19 other languages are something no phisher would try. So I am cautiously assuming it is real. If you ignore the letter - and it is real - then your share of the $60 million in bogus discounts - and more meaningfully your share of any other settlement, becomes Google's share. Yes it is not fair to set it up that way, these guys have no intention to be fair. Quote Liquidboy: You may be right about that. However each "vote" is based on the dollars involved. Us little guys hardly matter.
I received it too. Can anyone explain me how this affects non-US people and businesses? I'm not familair with this type of lawsuits and I don't get it how a third party can make a settlement with such sloppy terms that affect all other AdWords advertisers
That's good advise. I type the actual website name myself or check the source code first. That e-mail may be a scam. But they usually do set-up a website for class actions and ask people to join via the Internet these days. Is there a service that lets you open url's on their website securely, as in filtered or something? That would be a popular website I bet (hint to code writers)
I'm just wondering if this is legit or not..I got this in the mail recently Not sure, what is your guys' take on it?
It's in the news: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,194643,00.html http://edition.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/05/08/google.click.fraud.ap/index.html http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/journalgazette/business/14618972.htm?source=rss&channel=journalgazette_business But the mail you got seem a little fishy especially this "between January 1, 2002 and the present" - Whenever I got class action participation letter there was always an end date, how can you leave it open? Date must be defined. I don't believe an attorney would write it this way.
"Google's offer works out to a $4.50 refund (advertising credit) on every $1,000 spent in its vast advertising network over the past 4¼ years."
I got the same letter. The e-mail wasn't from google but how did they get all the e-mails of people signed up to adwords?
Yeah, that's a good question. I never signed any petition or anything for the class-act suit...so that's weird how they got it. Maybe Google was forced to hand the email addresses over? I personally haven't spent a cent on AdWords, so this doesn't affect me, but still, $4.50 out of $1000 is NOT that much heh...even if you're spending $100,000, that's still only like $450 back lol
I recieved a mail like this, I dont believe its real. But there is something puzzling is that how could they have known of my adwords account email??
Can you help me? I would like to advertise my site to everyone here? what do I need to do? Thank you F.S
Somehow they have got emails from Google so I assume its via legitimate means I got three emails - one for each of my accounts. Each email is very specific for log-in purposes and has never been used for any other reason or made public in any way.
Like whitespider, we got one for each purpose built email for each account. They MUST have gotten the addresses from Google.