Popular social networking site Reunion.com has been outed as a spammer. According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, the site dupes people into joining by sending an email pretending to be from someone who's looking for them. Once the person signs up, their address book is scraped and the site spams them with the same type of email. Nice, huh? Here's an excerpt of one victim's story:

West L.A. resident Elaine Schmidt experienced Reunion.com's aggressive marketing for herself when she received an e-mail the other day that appeared to be from a longtime acquaintance. It said: "Hi, I looked for you on Reunion.com, the largest people search service - but you weren't there." The e-mail instructed her to click on a link to see who else has been searching for her. Curious to see if her acquaintance had left a message, Schmidt, 44, clicked on the link and found herself at Reunion.com's site, where she was prompted to register so she could see who'd been searching for her.

In Schmidt's case, the e-mail that prompted her to open her address book to the company appeared to come from Vera Eck, a Santa Monica psychotherapist whom Schmidt has known for a while.

"I wasn't searching for her," Eck told me.

Just an hour or so before Schmidt received her e-mail, Eck, 46, said she received a message from what appeared to be the father of one of the kids in her son's Cub Scout pack. Curious to know why he was searching for her, she registered at Reunion.com to see if her acquaintance had left a message.

Eck provided access to her Gmail address book as part of the registration process. And so it goes.

The bottom line is that Reunion.com is employing a despicable marketing practice. If you get an email from them, delete it!