Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Mafia Wars CEO Brags About Scamming Users

Posted by Soulskill on from the all-about-the-benjamins dept.

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.

1 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Seen the likes before by Xerfas · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.