Zango Acquires Smart Shopper For $9 Million: Now More Evil
Duncan Riley
10 comments »
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://fakesteveballmer.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.