Tatto Media was previously in hot water with the Washington AG's office for ads/solicitations which implied that a "crush" was looking for someone.  (Previous post here; Media Post article here.) 
Tatto is back in the news, this time for allegedly violating a settlement agreement it entered into with the AG's office.  (Link to the "assurance of discontinuance" here [pdf].)  Here's the Washington AG's announcement [link]; relevant legal docs are linked at the AG's page. [Sidenote:  kudos to the AGs office for making the legal docs easy to access.  Too few agencies do this, and it's inexcusable not to in this day and age.]

The crux of what Tatto is accused of doing - and what it agreed not to do again (among other things) is:  "misrepresenting, either explicitly or implicitly, that a real person has an existing romantic interest in the computer user"; misrepresenting that "unless the computer user takes a specific action . . . he or she will lose the opportunity to learn the identity of a real [crush]"; and "once a computer user has attempted to navigate away from an initial [website] misrepresenting . . . that additional steps are required to complete the transaction."  According to the AG's announcement, Tatto media settled up the renewed enforcement action by paying $500,000 (approx). 

What are the takeaways?  Unfortunately, the takeaways are limited since Tatto was accused of violating the agreed enforcement order.  if the dispute went to court, the issue would not have been whether Tatto violated the law, but whether it violated the agreed injunction.  Other things?  Online advertising that plays upon the psychology of singles gets a lot of attention, and tends to be held to a slightly different standard in my estimation.  Singles almost seem on par with older folks or other categories of individuals who need increased protection online.  Sounds silly, but I think the Reunion.com and aspects of this dispute would have been dismissed as overzealous but legal advertising, rather than misleading marketing, if the marketing didn't prey upon "the single".  Indeed, a central term of the stipulated injunction is that Tatto will not misrepresent to a consumer that a crush is looking for him or her.

As far as specifics, the bulk of what caught the AG's attention probably relates to implementation of Tatto's campaign.  This is spelled out on the links from the AG's webpage, but the ads lured people in by saying: "click here to find out who has a crush on you."  This is probably innocuous enough (although I can see arguments on the other side and I would avoid anything along these lines as a marketer).  Once the user clicks on the ad, the user is dissuaded from navigating away from the page through the use of pop-up boxes which seem like error messages.  Another allegation is that one landing page allowed the user to enter their mobile number ostensibly for "test" purposes, but once entered, "the user agrees to pay a set amount per month to receive horoscope messages on his or her cell phone." 

Pop-up boxes in general, anything that dissuades users from navigating away from a page, and any statements that undermine clarity as to what the user is signing up are three things to watch out for or closely scrutinize.  The enforcement action also illustrates that marketing practices can become problematic in their implementation.  This means that marketers should run any borderline implementation (rather than just the proposal) by their lawyers.  Similarly, lawyers should ideally review the actual implementation, rather than a proposal which describes it.  I'm not saying this happened or didn't happen here, just that often the devil is in the implementation.

[Picture courtesy of Alan Defibaugh (creative commons license).  He has some great looking prints on his website.]