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Mafia Wars CEO Brags About Scamming Users
jamie writes with a follow-up to our recent discussion of social gaming scams:
"Mark Pincus, CEO of the company that brought us Mafia Wars, says: 'I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues right away. I mean, we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar, which was like, I don't know... I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it.'"
TechCrunch also ran a interesting tell-all from the CEO of a company specializing in Facebook advertisements, who provided some details on similarly shady operations at the popular social networking site.
Anything that exposes additional personal information on us to the web is bad IMO. All personal info, should be OFF by default anything less is unacceptable. If I choose to click a box and expose personal info, it should only be by my choice, not to agree to a TOS.
The guy even admits that the polls were BS, just collecting a user's personal information for selling to advertisers to generate revenue.
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... anyone using Facebook, that is. It's a pit of shady applications. Not even the nice applications are not annoying in some aspect. You can't even take a quiz there without having it try force itself onto others. Sometimes trying to fool you into thinking that the only way to see the results is to publish it to your friends.
There was a time when we couldn't dream of malicious quizzes, and infesting horoscopes, but Facebook brings the necessary application intelligence to us. In a bad way. Their application API must be like a spammer's wet dream.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
This is just a business man summing up to the obvious things that run this sort of business. If you don't control your product to maximize revenues, you are decreasing your wealth.
A friend of mine wrote a program which installed on the users computer even when you clicked "No" on the do you wish to install this application in Internet Explorer. This was to reconnect the users modem to a modempool his boss had which was very hard to get rid off, because he wrote it very viral like. Remove one or 2-3 parts and suddenly you had it again.
When I spoke to his boss about this and other stuff he had on their rippoff of the hotornot site he just shrugged and said it's in a gray area and not illegal yet so I don't care.
People like this will always be out there and they don't care how they make money or who gets hurt as long as they have a nice income.
... when people feel they need to get rich. This guy phrases it as 'controlling his destiny' to get profits as soon as possible, which IMHO reeks of addiction to money. And lets face it, some of the really rich people who control or own more or less reputable companies now have probably done some pretty shady things in the beginning of their career just to get to that point. Some probably just get there by chance, because they happen to have a talent that more or less by coincidence generates money, but some start with a real _need_ for money and power, which is a good incentive to not be too picky about morals and ethics. Thinks about real estate e.g., where lots of people are speculating hoping to get rich and ruthlessness can give you a real advantage.
I read about a research a while ago (years, sorry no source) that states that acquiring large sums of money creates the same kind of euphoria as for instance using cocaine as it causes the same neurotransmitters to be produced in the brain. Irrational need for more and more money is a real addiction I think and should be treated as such.
The only remarkable thing this guys is doing is being open and forward about it.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
"I love the smell of commerce in the morning."
The problem is that if he went to wall street or venture capitalists to get funding they would have just done everything they could to shaft him, so he tried to shaft as many other people as possible so he could avoid contact with them until he was a little bit stronger. Google did the same or though they did it in a more responsible manner as they had a better (more profitable) idea.
I dont read
Bad thieves and scammers steal and scam, and get squashed.
Meh thieves and scammers steal and scam, and brag about it.
Great thieves and scammers steal and scam, and get public funding as well as election votes.
Why getting mad at this guy, while great scammers run the world?
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/
Very depressing.
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
I mean, we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar, which was like, I don't know... I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it.
Hijackthis would usually get rid of most toolbars. Firefox toolbars are easier to get rid of.
My biggest problem with FB applications is the absurd policy about what rights do the applications have. Either you give them no rights at all (and can't use it) or you give them full access to all your and your friends' info. You can then go to settings and stop the application from posting to your wall, etc... But it has access to all the information you have access to.
There are occasionally rather interesting looking small games, quizes, etc. that I would want to try out... But I don't want to give them full access to all my information! Those quizes don't need it at all, the application doesn't use any of it. Perhaps a list of friend names so it can show "Your friends got these results" but that's it.
If there only was a way to use some checkbox list "Let these access list of my friends but not their (or my) relationshipstatus, their (or my) photos, the groups they (or I) belong to..." or anything like that, I would use a lot more applications. But it is either "Tell them everything or don't use them".
Instead of attacking his morals, let's attack the business plan and point out why upsetting your customers and breaking that important trust relationship is a bad long term strategy.
Take Amazon or PayPal for example... Would you use them again if they didn't accept a return unreasonably or stole your money?
I worked once for a company owning an online store. The big boss was extremely proud of himself for thinking about not offering the possibility to unsubscribe to the newsletters about products etc. The emails contained a text of the "click here to unsubscribe" sort, but it never worked.
His laugh when he told us this still haunts me, for years now. For him the clients were just a bunch of idiots with money to spend.
I have a scratch account on Facebook with only 1 friend, my real account. I use it for trying some apps because it has no valuable information. I can use privacy settings on my real account to prevent it seeing that.
Still, its page has sections that look like the normal Facebook UI but say things like "4 of your friends have sent you ......". The account only has 1 friend, so this is a banner ad dressed up to look like part of the UI.
Facebook should surely not allow this!
There are some people out there for whom you'd hope that some form of Karma applies, even if it is that by being untrustworthy themselves people around them start treating them as such. Sad to say and all that.
Get out.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
The only thing i find shocking about this is that he's actually honest about it. there are countless programs out there that got big by doing this, he's just admitting it!
"Behind every great fortune is a crime." -- Honoré de Balzac
... if not a criminal investigation. C'mon guys, he (and others) openly admit to fraudulently signing up users for subscription based texting schemes without EVER (even in the fine print) asking for the permission of the user. Considering that the carriers also benefited (I think they got half of the proceeds) they should also be strung up by the b***s for their complicity.
Whenever corporate mismanagement causes some calamity, people invariably decry the people responsible as "greedy bastards", "short-sighted morons", and so on. Although these statements are true, stating them is useless: greed, as a part of human nature, is here to stay. And organizations invariably elevate their most greedy and ambitious members because these are people are the ones who will exploit the rules to their advantage. Thus, given that greedy people will inevitably be in positions of power, we need to construct rules which ensure that this greed doesn't harm society. These rules need to make it the greedy party's interest to be a good participant in society.
We seem to ignore this principle. Over and over again, we fume and demand that companies and individuals be more responsible and respectful. Yet hardly anyone talks about implementing rules that would actually limit the damage.
A huge number of people believe that if society were just free of constraints, it'd organize itself into an efficient, elegant system and solve all our problems. That's wishful thinking. Greedy people will take advantage of inside connections, of special knowledge, and of outright dishonesty to screw over everyone else. And as much as we'd like to believe that the screwed will respond by researching their own information and leveling the playing field, doesn't actually happen, and won't.
First of all, even if everyone were equally capable, the screwing party has more time to research a particular type of transaction than the screwed party, so the asymmetry is really built-in. Second, not everyone is equally capable. As Larry Summers famously wrote, "There are idiots. Look around." Sometimes people can't help being idiots. Does that mean they deserve to be exploited? How far does that extend? Do people deserve to be exploited because they haven't studied browser security, or because they're not privy to office gossip, or because they don't have the social skills to network their way out of sticky situations?
We're going to keep seeing "X screwed over by powerful greedy person Y" stories until we use political channels to create new regulations that makes it in the best interests of the greedy to play nice with society. We can talk about the form these regulations should take. (IMHO, I think it's pretty clear we need far stronger privacy laws in the US.) What won't work is complaining that corporations are greedy. What won't work is trying to make laws while under the delusion that everyone is a rational actor with full access to relevant information. What might work is a determined effort to restore a sense of fair play and balance to our laws and institutions.
--
tl;dr: greed is a fact of life, and crying about it won't do any good. We need effective and strong regulation to prevent the greed that invariably appears from hurting the rest of us.
Mafia Wars is free. You never have to install anything, spend any money, or visit any other sites. If you want some of the special tokens, you can do those things... But the tokens will only get you things that you could get anyway if you simply had some patience.
All of this is completely in the users' hands. The sponsors page even says things like 'don't sign up for this if you don't really want information on the product' and things like that. If you don't really -want- the Zwinkie toolbar, you shouldn't install it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Considering Zynga shamelessly rips off the games of others (go look at FarmTown, released ~6 months before FarmVille), that he'd be ok with scamming people is not shocking.
"Upon attaching the waterblock to my penis, I began to notice that I know nothing about computers." -- JRockway
Would love to see this prick "sleep with the fishes".
I am sure, supporters of this fine example of business will also defend this scam.
It's a true masterpiece -- from dynamically generated "comments", to a disclaimer that everything on the page is a lie disguised as a "Terms and Conditions" fine print.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The root of all this is that it's still unclear just *how* to earn money from the service(s) Facebook provides, both for Facebook itself and for app developers. Apparently, showing ads down people's throats in one way (web) or the other (shady toolbar apps) is currently the only way.
-- Sig down
What makes this different is the intention of this, as opposed to some bug.
The games are free, at least on the surface, but facebook games also factor in elapsed time... so they are only free, if you consider your time to be free.
They are designed to take years to play, each day you log in and click a button here or there, and then leave it. By providing pay-for-stuff-now content, games like those provided by Zynga are allowing users to skip the need to wait for months in order to have features in the game immediately. Essentially it allows players to 'go munchkin' (power up even at low levels) and essentially pay for the ability to get ahead in the game.
Not only do the games pander to the greedy side of human nature, but also to the impatient side of us. They're designed to take advantage of our worst qualities. All of these games encourage sharing/publishing your "feats" in the game to attract the attention of your friends--so they'll join you in the game.
Some games require you to "share" the game with other players and recruit others in order to unlock features--therefore garanteeing that the best players bring in other players. In a popular game that I just played, one had to have about 100 other players coordinate "attacks" against an otherwise unbeatable foe in order to beat that boss.
It's quite an ingenious niche in that the games start off very simple, and can grow complicated as the userbase matures. You really can't "win" a game like this, and unlike MMOs with level caps, and other game balancing features, there's really no motivation to balance the players that pay out. They simply add more content as time passes, or for special occasions, more features, and due to the casual nature of the game play and the forced ellapsed time requirements between game leveling, the illusion is that you're really not spending money or time on it at all...
http://www.beanleafpress.com
Who would have guessed that the sort of pathetic douchebag who hangs out on Facebook would be susceptible to being scammed?
Seriously, it's called Mafia Wars. The dev team was just getting into character.
They do equally shady stuff for "favor points" on Mobsters which I play. No big deal though - I keep a tiny virtual machine on my system that I boot up and RDP into if I ever need to install stuff for points. It's confined to the VM and can do no harm there.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Now that was a huge contribution...
I went to FB and clicked just on some application that I hadn't installed. The message it shows as it gives you allow/cancel options is:
Allowing FishVille access will let it pull your profile information, photos, your friends' info, and other content that it requires to work.
I think that this is pretty clear. I have seen applications that rank your friends based on how much you interact with them (based on comments, wallpost, use of "like" button, etc.) so... It has access to everything else except private messages. Most applications probably don't use all the info they have access to but we who install them don't ever know what data they looked at.
As I've refused giving these applications access to my personal information that would certainly seem to be a breach of the data protection act in the UK as I explicitly denied them access to my information when I recieved requests and of course, friends can't legally give permission to hand my data out.
But they can hand out their data about you. If your friend has written down your name, e-mail, address, etc. in his calendar, I would (without knowing specific UK laws that apply here) assume that they have the right to show it to someone else or even put it on their website if they want to. Once they know something, that data is (based purely on my logic, again with no knowledge of said laws) theirs to use or share as they want. Unless of course you have asked them to sign some privacy policy before allowing them to add you on FB. I am pretty sure that FB eula at least covers this issue.
They don't serve any purpose to benefit the users, so why run them?
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
If you are using Firefox, Safari, Opera or Chrome, get Greasemonkey and install the Facebook Purity script (http://steeev.freehostia.com/wp/2009/03/19/facebook_purity_cleans_up_the_facebook_homepage/).
It blocks Mafia Wars, Farmville, quizzes and more. Basically you just see stuff your friends actually write.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Can he go to jail now? It would be great to have one less scammer at large.
http://dilbert.com/2010-12-13
So most of these scam networks block Northern California, to prevent Facebook HQ from seeing them? So that's why I don't see them. I'm a few miles from Facebook HQ. I've completely missed this phenomenon.
I'd applied SiteTruth to Google ads, trying to warn users about the "bottom feeders" with no identifiable legitimate business behind the ad. Myspace is mostly Google ads, so that's covered. Google ads in general are about 35% "bottom feeders" (we track this), but on Myspace, the percentage is much higher. From the article, Facebook has a similar problem, but it's mostly in the form of Facebook-specific ads, games, etc. We're not catching those.
Maybe it's time to do that.
I still will not freaking touch WeatherBug, even though apparently it's gone legit.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I get tired of seeing or hearing about his shitty games and then to find out he's a unscrupulous douche bag...all I can say is I hope he gets beat hard. Preferably by a clown.
This was extremely useful to me.
But when its Google, its all good... Morons.
"They confiscated everything, even the stuff we didn't steal!"
and those grapes were sour anyways, weren't they.