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Scams

by Mike Masnick

Thu, May 15th 2003 3:58pm





Pop-Up Scams Of The Day

from the they're-everywhere dept

It seems like every day there's some new scam happening online, so to make life easier, today I'll put two together for the price of one. What a deal. First, the state of California is suing a software company in New Jersey for creating a scam where they tricked people into installing software that generated pop up ads - that were actually disconnecting your internet connection and dialed into an expensive $4.99/minute phone line. Meanwhile, less nefarious, but still quite annoying are claims that AOL tricked people into signing up for multiple accounts, by sending them confusing pop up ads that people accidentally clicked through. I guess this is part of AOL's strategy to replace the advertising money they lost when they dropped third party pop up ads and replaced them with AOL pop ups instead. There aren't many details in the article, but I'm wondering why you would send a pop up to someone who is, clearly, already a subscriber asking them if they want to buy another AOL account?

2 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    AOL Marketing

    identicon
    Bryan Price, May 15th, 2003 @ 5:32pm

    For awhile after I moved from Ohio to Florida, I was using my wife's AOL account for my Internet fix. I can rememember the popups asking me if I wanted to take my subordinate account and make it a master account. I thought that was an amazing/amusing way for AOL to crank up yet even more subscribers...

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Re: AOL Marketing

    identicon
    Chris, May 15th, 2003 @ 7:11pm

    They must have learned this trick from the masters at Time Warner. They start sending the "must renew now" notices for magazines when you have 8 months left on the subscription. I wonder how many people end up resubscribing twice and thus locking in the subscribtion for two or more years when that was never their intent. The scams never really change...

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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