In a statement on his website, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said on Thursday that his office would soon sue the social-networking service, Tagged. com, for "an illegal plan to lure new members and artificially inflate traffic on its site."

Accusing the San-Francisco-based social network for deceptive email-marketing practices and invasion of privacy, Cuomo said in his statement: "Consumers who visited Tagged were tricked into providing the company with access to their personal email contacts, which the company then used to send millions of promotional emails.

Tagged disguised these solicitations to make them appear as if they were coming from a personal contact, when they were actually spam."

The 2004-founded Tagged, which sent solicitation messages to personal contacts of consumers, during the April-June period, has posted an apology for its actions last month, saying that the problem arose because of a new registration process that has been terminated in early June.

However, in its apology for causing unintentional "inconvenience or frustration" to the users, the company added that it neither accessed users' personal address books nor sent emails without their permission. It said that the users had inadvertently given their consent during the process of registration.

Saying that the company had suspended the problematic registration process before being contacted by the Attorney General's office, Greg Tseng - Tagged's founder and Chief Executive Officer - termed Cuomo's recent announcement as "disheartening."