Everyone’s favorite love-to-hate spyware company Zango has acquired browser based comparison shopping engine Smart Shopper for what we’ve been told by two people related to the company (but unconfirmed directly) for $9 million.
Smart Shopper offers what on the surface appears to be a fairly non-threatening shopping assistant add on for Internet Explorer, however according to a number of sites is really adware that does nothing more than deliver advertisements and is difficult to remove.
Zango has a long history in the spyware business, having faced numerous court challenges over its business tactics whilst attempting to get in on the social networking and social shopping craze. Zango offers free games to MySpace users that according to our July 2006 report, results in users installing a spyware toolbar as well.
Smart Shopper Networks was previously owned by New York based HotBar Inc, another company that comes up as a spyware producer according to a search of Google.
So the smart shoppers will get free spyware offer for shopping.
spyware buys spyware not bad.
Zango truly is evil, I hope they rot!
People, why do you love to hate so much?
Zango is evil, this is true.
SmartShopper is really helpful when you do your shopping on the Internet, and it is easy as pie to remove it if you don’t want it – you just open the list of programs, and there in plain site you can choose “remove SmartShopper” and it is gone without a trace.
People who say otherwise – I challenge you to post here the results of a disk / registry scan after you have removed SmartShopper and prove that it is not removed completely.
Zango made a dumb smart shopper deal. lol
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
I also gotta say that that was pretty flimsy reporting. You say SmartShopper is “really adware that does nothing more than deliver advertisements and is difficult to remove.” and use a search on Google as your reference for that? You could have at least installed it and checked it out, then removed it to see how hard it was.
well, now you are owned by the spam kings, have fun.
I have to say it but Don (#6) is right, Duncan. Pretty weak reporting. Not only what Don said about it being adware, you said in your piece that Smart Shopper was previously owned by HotBar.com, Inc., another adware distributor. Well, most tech-savvy people like me know that 180 Solutions and HotBar.com merged early in 2006 or late 2005 to create one unified company, Zango. The merged company name was Zango, Inc. So, they likely simply transferred the domain registration for “Smart Shopper” and updated the “about us” page to reflect this, albeit over a year and a half late!
Cheers,
Doug
Guy,
I don’t know about Jango or HotBar.com but I do use SmartShopper for a long time now and it is one of the best software I have installed.
It is ease to uninstall it and I’m not getting any ads from it.
so please give those guys the credit they disserve.
are you kidding me? smartshopper is very difficult to remove. i went to open my control panel and smartshopper is not listed. then i tried to find anti-adware to remove this darn thing but you got to pay to have it remove it. ahhh!!! still stuck with smartshopper. i got infected with it when i installed pando. now i uninstalled it and i still have smartshopper!!! help!!
how do you get rid of this thing i want it off how do i remove it help pleas
I downloaded a free zip utility called jZip. It installed Smartshopper, Yahoo Toolbar, Yahoo as the default search engine, and a lot of other stuff I can’t remember. It took me about an hour of fiddling to remove all this stuff. (I also removed jZip)
Stay away from jZip.
I have found a way to finally remove smart shopper..This will help everyone that hates this adware.
Open IE and click on Tools, then select Mangage Add-Ons. Click on Enable or Disable AdOns Find Smart Shopper and click on it…then select disable. Keep in mind that you will probably find Smart Shopper listed several times…you have to select each one and select disable.
Thats It!!! GoodBye Smart Shopper.
Your Welcome.
Thanks Michael – i was trying to figure out how in the hell I ended up with this (and Yahoo). It was jZip for me too.