Hillel Aron
LOS ANGELES (CN) — California shoppers hit Temu with a class action accusing the Chinese online marketplace of “modern spam abuse” through the use of false subject lines, misleading headers and spoofed domains to trick them into opening emails they would otherwise ignore.
The one named plaintiff in Monday’s complaint, Dallas Pottish, says Temu “installed a web of illegal tracking pixels” on his device after he visited the website, allowing the platform to follow his “behavior across the internet, converting a single deceptive email into ongoing digital surveillance.”
California laws against spam emails are stricter than most states, banning most unsolicited commercial email advertisements and allowing recipients to sue for up to $1,000 per unwanted email. This has led to a wave of class actions against such businesses as Overstock, Vivint and 3 Day Blinds.
Founded less than four years ago, Temu has enjoyed meteoric growth in more than 90 markets around the world, including the United States, where it has become one of the few e-commerce websites to rival Amazon. It was the most downloaded app on Apple’s U.S. App Store in 2023 and 2024, becoming nearly synonymous with cheap, questionably sourced Chinese goods. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s wife was recently rumored to have worn a $13 dress she bought on Temu.
Temu has also been criticized for selling goods that may have been made with child labor. And several class actions have already accused the company of violating laws concerning the handling of customers’ digital privacy. In December 2025, Arizona sued Temu over consumer data theft and the sale of counterfeit brands.
Monday’s class action seeks to represent all Californians who received an email from Temu that contained “a falsified, misrepresented or forged” domain name, header information or subject line, as well as any Californian “whose interactions, communications or personally identifiable information were intercepted, collected or transmitted to any data brokers.”
Pottish claims he received an email from a “nonsensical email address” advertising wares on Temu.
“Confused, and believing that the email might be from a legitimate source rather than an anonymous mass marketing campaign, plaintiff opened the email,” Pottish writes in the complaint, filed in LA County Superior Court. The email, Pottish says, employed a panoply of technological tricks in order to “evade spam detection, conceal the sender’s identity and surreptitiously track recipients.”
“Based on publicly available sources, it is believed that Temu.com is responsible for over 10,000 spam emails to Californians each year,” Pottish writes in the complaint.
Pottish cites a typical subject line: “$0.01 False Nails — Ends Soon.”
“No such product is actually sold at that price, as plaintiff confirmed by scouring the website,” Pottish writes. “The phrase ‘Ends Soon’ reinforces the deception by creating artificial urgency, implying a limited-time promotion that requires immediate action, when in reality no genuine time-limited sale exists.”
Spokespeople from Temu did not immediately return an email requesting comment on the latest lawsuit.
