Company using facebook to scam children

We all know there are plenty of games on Facebook, like recent hits Farmville, Mafia wars and Texas HoldEm poker, all created by game company Zynga.

Zynga’s revenue model is entirely based on players buying virtual goods – like gaining quick access to more land in farm-game Farmville – to enhance their game experience and competitiveness. What you perhaps didn’t know, is that besides buying virtual currency with credit card or Paypal, Zynga signed a deal with Offerpal last month to allow players to do survey’s to receive virtual currency.

Trade a few minutes of your time for some virtual currency bucks. Sounds like a good deal right? Well, we’re not quite sure about that. Offerpal Media allows third party’s to create surveys for their platform. One of the bigger third party is Celldorado, (a quick Google search shows Spyware related results for the name, but we’re not certain if that’s linked) which give the user the impression that they receive virtual currency for the survey, but they are actually signing terms for a paid SMS subscription that could cost you up to 27 Euro (40 Dollars). Suddenly, that small payment turned in a big game investment!

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