Games on social networks are built on fraud, the expert claims

The founder and editor -in -chief of the TechCrunch.com blog, dedicated to Web 2.0 products and companies, Michael Arrington became interested in the topic of gaming fraud on social networks. In his opinion, the developers of social games for Facebook and MySpace, as well as intermediaries, are actively resorting to dishonest methods of earning naive users, and the administration of social networks usually looks at it through fingers, because it has “two percent” from this. This was reported by the weblanet with reference to Techcrunch.com .

Arrington estimates the dishonest profit of each of the largest such companies in tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

In games like Farmville and Mobsters, which play millions of users, use their own virtual currency, with which players can improve their game status in different ways. You can buy virtual currency by paying a real credit card, but there are also “free” methods of increasing game capital, which in fact bring to companies even more profits.

The expert gives examples when users are offered to take a test for IQ or download the trial version of a program, receiving a certain amount of virtual money in return. Nowhere in these offers it is said that the user, without even having a credit card, will lose real money in both cases.

Monetization is carried out in various ways: for example, money can be removed from a mobile phone (to pass the test on the IQ, the user will need to enter the number of his mobile phone and a pin code), or may be charged for the delivery of the "free" CD with the program.

The money acquired by dishonest means is immediately spent on a new similar "advertising" that attracts new users.

The head of Blitzlocal Dennis Yu, who himself participated in such a "business", told a lot of interesting things in confirmation of Arrington's words. So, Facebook developers gain access to personal data of users and their social relations.

This allows you to personalize benches (such as "your friend invites you to play with him"), which misleads users, especially if the advertising visually resembles the Facebook style.

According to him, CTR from such an “advertisement” is an order of magnitude higher than CTR in Google Adsense - about 4% versus 0.1%, with the same click cost.

Yu also noted that he himself tried a variety of methods to promote Facebook users on grandmas and, in the end, came to the conclusion: they will not pay, because they do not have credit cards, they do not want to have a credit card and do not want to buy anything. But they can be deceived in one of several ways by persuading either a cunning toolbar of tools in the browser, or enter your email, or share your mobile phone number.

Several other developers of games for social networks have recognized that the situation is precisely: many people resort to such methods of earning. True, this was recognized by those who have not used these methods for a long time for ethical reasons. And the leader of one of the less scrupulous companies was not ashamed to bloomily criticize Arrington's opinion, using the difficult to translate "Shit, Doubleshit, and Bullshit".