Video Professor responds to Scamville article

Recently TechCrunch wrote an interesting investigative report called “Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell,” which pointed out the questionable practice of allowing users to opt-in to special offers in order to earn in-game currency from titles made by social game developers like Zynga and Playfish. In that article, the author categorized the Video Professor products as particularly scam-my. The special offers would often have “fine print” or would have charges that consumers might not know about until after the transaction was complete.

Other web sites, like Business Insider, referenced that article, and cited other sources for facts, saying that Video Professor in particular was an out and out scam. Video Professor, in case you don’t know, is a series of educational CD-ROMs that claims to teach its users techniques to master certain programs like Excel, operating systems like Windows XP or online services like eBay. Certainly the offers as detailed in all of these reports are questionable, but Video Professor is feeling a bit battered and bruised.

A recent exchange of emails with its Vice President of Public Affairs, Brian Olson, pointed out one truth: the company was never given the opportunity to defend itself or to explain its products, services and business practices. In fact, the company was met with either silence or out and out hostility from most journalists. According to Olson, one nameless editor offered the following response to an inquiry on presenting the company’s side of the story:

“It’s a huge fucking scam. And you know it.”

Ouch. Considering that the use of its name (and other offers) could have ruined Playfish’s chances to be acquired by EA - a deal which was finalized earlier this week - and the fact that Zynga’s CEO indirectly mentioned these deals in a recent blog post (and a video making the rounds on YouTube), we thought it would be fair to give the company a chance to defend itself. The company at least deserves some credit for trying to address all the talk about its products being a rip-off to consumers. First a response to the allegation that its dealings with Zynga and Playfish were shady:

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F-Secure details World of Warcraft scams, trojans

Players of Blizzard’s ultra popular MMO World of Warcraft are under attack by a phishing scheme that lets the attacker steal players’ gold and rare items by luring players with an offer of “free in-game mounts,” anti-virus and security researchers at F-Secure point out. This is common knowledge to many WOW players (read the official forums for proof), but not to those few of us that don’t play World of Warcraft, or security experts who don’t pay too much attention to virtual worlds.

The attacker lures the player in by using the in-game World of Warcraft chat system to spam links, which victims then click on to go to a site that looks a lot like the official World of Warcraft site. There they divulge their information (account name, login, password) to complete strangers. Once the attacker has this information they find their way to that account and unload their virtual goods to another account and then sell it for real money in online auctions in places like China.

Another way of getting robbed of your precious WOW commodities and loot is much more malicous - a family of trojans called “WOW” (Trojan-PSW.Win32.WOW ). How you get it isn’t perfectly clear (F-Secure mentions banner ads on malicious web sites), but this malware steals account information and passwords related to World of Warcraft. F-Secure describes it as follows: “The WOW trojan is designed to steal account information in order to allow a remote hacker access to the player’s account. The hacker can then logon and steal the player’s virtual assets by transferring them to another player account. Such assets are often sold or auctioned off for real-world currency. With millions of players, such trojans can easily affect thousands of users.”

A good visual walkthrough of how this might happen can be found on F-Secure’s Blog.

As always, if something is probably too good to be true, then it probably is a scam.