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.

Comments

Re:And he likes that he did this...

[PopeRatzo]

but it would suck to get a decent following and friends list and have it all ripped away when they canceled you

But not as bad as getting the Zwinky toolbar. Some years ago I got one of those horrible persistent-ware things and it was like the monkey's paw. I finally had to run my computer over with my car repeatedly to finally get rid of it.