Customer sparks heated debate after exposing company's aggressive email tactics: 'This should be illegal'

A Reddit user shared an odd series of emails from a company, which they believed to be deceitful.

They shared a photo of two emails sent back-to-back by a company the Redditor had previously purchased from. In the first email, the subject line reads, "New Staff Discount Code." In the immediate follow-up email, the subject says: "We were not supposed to share that."

The user's post, titled "predatory marketing practices like this should be illegal," explained how they, as someone who works in IT, expect that the marketing email and internal staff emails come from completely different systems, and a misstep like this would be impossible. What's more, the discount code for the staff was simply "STAFF," a too-obvious code that a company would likely never employ.

The original poster explained: "Makes me believe that this was an intentional marketing tactic. Why is it okay for companies to intentionally deceive people?"

While shady marketing tactics are not unheard of — as exemplified, for example, through specific products posing as sustainable or utilizing "greenwashing" — this particular scheme seriously upset viewers of the post.

One commenter labeled this form of marketing as "mistake marketing, it's really taken off in the last year or so. It's a great way to encourage online virality, but scummy as f*** since it's all fake."

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According to the United States Federal Trade Commission, "when consumers see or hear an advertisement, whether it's on the internet, radio or television, or anywhere else, federal law says that ad must be truthful, not misleading."

Still, companies like the one sending this email are able to get away with lying, as they are not being dishonest about the actual product or its price. There are loopholes that let manipulative marketing slip through the cracks. Though the original post mentions that dishonest practices like the emails should be illegal, the reality is that it's technically above board.

More commenters on the post expressed their dissatisfaction with ploys like this one, which are apparently not too uncommon. One said: "A company did this a couple of years ago. … I've never bought from them or been to one of their stores since."

Someone else, fed up with marketing altogether, said: "Marketing by definition is an exercise in predatory misinformation and manipulation, I wish it could all be regulated."