A Tour Of A “Pay to Download Firefox” Site

http://www.gerv.net/hacking/pay-download-tour/

by robin_reala • 17 years ago

89 45 17 years ago

Ever wonder how to put yourself closer to the front of the line to hell? This is a good article to read if you're interested.

I'm all for capitalism and making money, but this is just wrong. Sure you can say, well people are dumb enough! Yeah, most people are dumb, but that doesn't mean you go ripping them off.

condor• 17 years ago

couldn't agree more . . . just because something exists in a market doesn't mean it should. Capitalism is a system/strategy, how you apply that depends on your values (or what you value).

lionhearted2• 17 years ago

> I'm all for capitalism and making money, but this is just wrong.

I think this a problem that people have - they (somehow) equate corruption/taking advantage of people/kickbacks with "capitalism". This is not the case - I've spent some a bit of time in more socialist and communist countries, and these things seem to happen even more there. People trying to take advantage of others happens regardless of economic or political systems.

conanite• 17 years ago

The law unfortunately is our best effort at drawing a clear line (i said, "best effort") between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. I'm not sure there is any hypothetical legal system that could eliminate every one of these scam businesses. And I'm not sure there's a hypothetical education system that can prepare those who would be fools, enough to put the scammers out of business.

And I would be scared of a business ethics committee deciding which companies are allowed to run. It would be worse than the App Store.

RyanMcGreal• 17 years ago

Capitalism flat-out can't function without a reasonably clear, consistent and fair application of the rule of law (a painfully and repeatedly demonstrated fact that neoliberal and libertarian fundamentalists tend to forget).

netsp4• 17 years ago

The premise of capitalism (especially capitalism as moral philosophy) is that if two parties come together & a transaction occurs, both walk away better off. Otherwise the transaction would not occur. Therefore, it cannot be considered immoral.

Protection against corruption/taking advantage is built in. Don't like it? Don't buy it.

prpon• 17 years ago

"Once you submit your order for Membership, it is nonrefundable. Only in cases of fraud will the payment be refunded. This policy is in place due to an abuse of credit card chargebacks and theft of information. All requests for refunds due to fraud MUST be made in writing and physically mailed to freedownloadzone."

What they are doing at freedownloadzone is exactly that "theft of information and abuse of credit cards".

wallflower2• 17 years ago

Can't Firefox block the referrer? This seems to be up there with scamming senior citizens.

wizard_2• 17 years ago

You get an escalating war that way with out actually fixing the problem. They're better off warning users on download.

wallflower2• 17 years ago

Good point. I guess the only real solution may be for Mozilla to try to compete against these unethical advertisers by spending dollars on advertising from these same smaller search engines, emphasizing "Free"

> These sites get their custom through advertising. We and the major search engine providers do a reasonable job of keeping these people's adverts away from our trademarked terms and keywords but we can't be everywhere, and they can often be found on smaller search engines.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

"New computer users should find our services valuable, and a time saver. If you are an advanced computer user, you probably don't need our services. "

I think they missed making that more clear, suggested rewrite:

"Clueless newbies we like to rip off, everybody else is a waste of our bandwidth, so go away"

Euclidinvestments/Cardtransaction.com, the company behind all this is based in the UK:

   Saphie Number One Limited (Reg 91918)
   26 York Street                       
   London,  W1U 6PZ                     
   United Kingdom

They ought to lose their merchant account, considering how hard it can be for legit businesses to get one I find it hard to believe that these scammers manage to hold on to theirs.

noonespecial• 17 years ago

Just drop that info along with the url into 4chan. I have a feeling this problem will work itself right on out...

joeythibault2• 17 years ago

Actually, it's not that hard to get a merchant account considering their site is very straight forward. They list their address, the site has a secure cert and numbers to the tech support. It's all the things that companies like Auth.net ask for.

That being said, my computer raises all sorts of red-flags when I go to the site.

Now, I just wonder how good their customer service is, 'cause if clueless newbies fall for the trap, the least they could do is to support them as they figure out how to turn their computers on, explain what a browser is and what they should click to access the internet...

They do claim to answer every call in 90 seconds (800 978 7657) and I was talking to someone within about 30 seconds.

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

You wouldn't want someone to miss out on clicking that final submit button.

They're scammers, pure and simple, they should have no right to a merchant account. I don't even much care if it is legal or not, legal does not always mean 'right' and in this case 'legal' might be clearly 'wrong'.

VISA et al make lots of value judgments as to which customers can have merchant accounts and which don't.

So in this case they can make that judgment too. Especially the 'upsell' on the last screen off-center is the mark of the real scammer. There was a time when a company called IBill would facilitate this kind of junk, they crashed because of it (and several other good reasons besides, but that's another story, the $1 fake transactions to dillute the chargebacks had a lot to do with it too), if assholes like this can't get merchant accounts then life will be better for all of us.

Not that long ago we applied for a merchant account to sell 2nd hand CDs and we were turned down, in spite of being a perfectly legit business. These jerks being able to operate their scam seriously pisses me off.

DrJokepu• 17 years ago

That's in a very expensive (mainly residential) area in Central London called Marylebone. The asking price for an average flat in that area is around £2 million ($3.25 million) at the moment. I would be really surprised if that was the real premises of that company. Most likely they just rent a mailbox there.

blhack• 17 years ago

I wish that firefox would start charging. Something like a $100 for a 1000 seat license or something similar.

Why?

Because when I go to one of my bosses and say "I think we try and transition away from IE. Here, this is Firefox, it is free and it is wonderful", their reaction is "Free?!" and visions of shitty freeware from the 90s fill their heads.

In order to keep us geeks happy, they could offer a source distribution that needs to be compiled or has some trivial dependency that needs to be installed.

amalcon• 17 years ago

The problem is that, as soon as they start charging, they open themselves up to liability. That's actually exactly what your bosses want: someone to take the liability.

inklesspen• 17 years ago

Does Microsoft take liability for any of their software?

The Windows XP EULA states "Except for any refund elected by Microsoft, YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO ANY DAMAGES, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, if the Software does not meet Microsoft's Limited Warranty, and, to the maximum extent allowed by applicable law, even if any remedy fails of its essential purpose."

It goes on to state that the only remedy offered is your money back. Mozilla also offers your money back, all $0 of it.

zach• 17 years ago

Well, they want a business relationship. If I give you money for something, there is a social, legal and economic expectation that you have an obligation to give me whatever it is you took the money for.

Or, to flip it around, beggars can't be choosers, and since they're executives...

omouse2• 17 years ago

It wouldn't be a "seat license", it would be a redistribution fee or something. They really should have a version for businesses.

Actually, since it's legal, you could start your own company that sells Firefox to businesses. I think the only requirement is that you can't call it Firefox but have to call it something else (trademarks or something).

cookiecaper• 17 years ago

One could contract with Mozilla to become an "official support distributor" or something like that and obtain the rights to use the trademark, assuming Mozilla is agreed to such a deal, and I don't see why they wouldn't be, it only stands to improve adoption if the company offering support is legit.

Also, I'm not sure if you're right or not. From what I remember, you can only call the product Firefox if the code matches verbatim; Debian &c. apply custom patches not included in Firefox proper and are therefore obliged to rebrand. If you used the Mozilla builds, are you sure this would apply? Curious here.

nazgulnarsil3• 17 years ago

all the moral righteousness is pretty funny/sad at the same time. they're charging for access to their call center basically. I don't really see anything wrong with that.

the beauty of capitalism is that no one (even you smart geeks) gets to decide what the price of things are. you live and die by consumer demand.

turkishrevenge3• 17 years ago

"all the moral righteousness is pretty funny/sad at the same time. they're charging for access to their call center basically. I don't really see anything wrong with that."

Really? Despite the fact that what the site in question is doing is blatantly predatory in nature? I would be willing to wager that it heavily depends on the naivety of new (read: probably elderly) computer users in order to make money. If you're fine with this, I don't know how you could justify such a position.

"the beauty of capitalism is that no one (even you smart geeks) gets to decide what the price of things are. you live and die by consumer demand."

Except of course, in situations of monopolies, combines, and cartels (and their respective subsidiaries and holdings), which is how the capitalism you speak of works in the 21st century.

coderdude• 17 years ago

My step dad bought a subscription to AVG Free for his WinXP Home machine. I would consider it blatantly predatorial to let people do that, even if they activate the one useless plugin that wasn't enabled before. People are going to spend the money.

Periodic• 17 years ago

I think you two need to separate out what you are talking about.

I absolutely agree that "they're charging for access to their call center basically. I don't really see anything wrong with that.". However, I also agree that "what the site in question is doing is blatantly predatory in nature".

I would say that there is no transgression in selling these services. However, they should be held liable for deceptive and predatory marketing practices. These things are wonderfully taken care of by the market and consumers. You see, consumers got together and formed an organization to look for people who are trying to take advantage of them and then kick their asses if they don't stop. I believe in most countries it's called a government.

omouse2• 17 years ago

I'm pretty sure the Firefox license allows it to be sold. The only legal problem here is that the people are using the name Firefox which is trademarked by Mozilla Corp.

nazgulnarsil3• 17 years ago

monopolies only happen because of government enforcement. no price fixing has ever been maintained in history that was not supported by the government. If you have a counter example I would love to hear it because I have done considerable searching on the subject. you're talking about corporatism, plain and simple.

as far as being blatantly predatory, unless the site actually lies there isn't a problem. if telling half truths is morally wrong then you have some bigger demons to grapple with than someone selling firefox (car industry, fashion industry, healthcare industry, it never ends).

netsp4• 17 years ago

they're charging for access to their call center basically. I don't really see anything wrong with that.

Rubbish. They are charging people to download Firefox. The reason they can do this is because people don't know it's free. If you approached these people & said, "do you want to buy access to our call center?" They would say no.

tphyahoo• 17 years ago

kill it with fire.

matthijs• 17 years ago

There are so many of these sites, the shortest url I know involved in this is tv.org ( http://tv.org/join.php ).

Credit card companies block sites like allofmp3.com but still help these kinds of scammers. As soon as they start blocking/refusing these kind of sites it gets a whole lot harder for them to scam people...

A Tour Of A “Pay to Download Firefox” Site

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