The Chinese e-commerce giant is accused of violating California’s strict anti-spam statute.
LOS ANGELES (CN) – Chinese online marketplace Temu was hit by a class action on Monday, accusing it of “modern spam abuse” by using fake subject lines, misleading titles and fake domains to trick California shoppers into opening emails they would otherwise ignore.
The plaintiff named in the complaint, Dallas Pottish, says Temu “installed a network of illegal tracking pixels” on his device after visiting the website, allowing the platform to track his “online behavior, converting a single fraudulent email into continuous digital surveillance.”
California’s anti-spam laws are stricter than most states, banning most unsolicited commercial email advertising and allowing recipients to be sued up to $1,000 per spam email. This has led to a wave of class actions against businesses such 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 sites to rival Amazon. It was the most downloaded app on Apple’s US App Store in 2023 and 2024, becoming almost synonymous with cheap Chinese goods of dubious sources. The wife of US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was recently rumored to be wearing a $13 dress that she bought in Temu.
Temu has also been criticized for selling goods that may have been made with child labour. And several class actions have already accused the company of violating laws related to its handling of customers’ digital privacy. In December 2025, Arizona unsuspecting Temu on the theft of consumer data and the sale of counterfeit brands.
Monday’s class action seeks to represent all Californians who received an email from Temu that contained “a forged, misrepresented or falsified domain name,” title or subject line information, and any Californian “whose interactions, communications or personally identifiable information was intercepted, collected or transmitted to any data broker.”
Pottish claims he received an email from a “nonsense email address” advertising Temu merchandise.
“Confused and believing the email might be from a legitimate source and not an anonymous mass marketing campaign, Plaintiff opened the email,” Pottish wrote in the complaint, filed in LA County Superior Court. The email, Pottish says, used a variety of technological tricks to “avoid spam detection, hide the identity of the sender and surreptitiously track recipients.”
“Based on publicly available sources, Temu.com is believed to be responsible for over 10,000 spam emails to Californians each year,” Pottish wrote in the complaint.
Pottish cites a typical thread: “Fake Nails $0.01 – Expiring 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 there is no real time-limited sale.”
Spokespeople from Temu did not immediately return an email seeking comment on the latest lawsuit.
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