There has been a lot of stink recently about Facebook game publishers using scams and fraud offers to get people to gain virtual cash for games like Farmville and other games that seem to take hours away from people I work with. Some are even being pushed to the iPhone and the scams are the same, these game developers are making millions of dollars off you.
These games are trying to get you to pay cash for items in the game so that you can compete or have more fun, and that is fine I have no problem with people buying items for games and such that is the choice of the user, however if you do not want to pay cash you can use click on Cost Per Action items, meaning the publisher gets money for each item you complete. Like sign up for Video Professor (which I will be doing a story on soon). If you complete these offers you will get some type of item in-game.
What is bad is these offers while they seem free, or harmless because you are only signing up for a free trial is actually costing you more than if you just pull out your credit card and buy the items directly. People are getting suckered in and paying for these free trials and ending up in a billing cycle from hell and having a hard time to get out. The more money these publishers make from these scam offers the more they advertise and the more they pull in more users who are also doing the same thing. Hell of a cycle they are making a ton of money off this.
I will be boycotting Zynga everything they are leading the pack in money generation from these scams. Will Facebook be willing to kill this? I doubt it Facebook got to profitability somehow and I doubt they want to cut off a close to $50 million dollars in advertising for these scam packed offers with these games. Techcrunch has a huge write-up on it and I recommend reading up on it. These have also brought a few more companies I want to look at and they are Video Professor, Tatto Media, Offerpal, SuperRewards and a few others.
I recommend reading the series of articles. Scamville the Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell
