Fake video webmaster is also pushing Zango

Check the site out in the screenshot, courtesy of the awesome Mike Burgess. Looks like a nice, normal site with some hot chick who rides around in cars and stuff. And look! A video of said chick sprawled all over her sports car and dancing or whatever. The video is provided by my bestest buddies ever, Zango. Well, nothing unusual there, right? Normal site, normal install, nothing dodgy. Seen the site before, yeah it installs Zango but there's no funny business going on. Are you wondering what my point is yet?

Well, sadly the guy who owns that site also happens to own the Paris Hilton site covered here by Sunbelt. They get you to download completely fake "videos" that actually install lots of Dollar Revenue Adware (and some other stuff, too). It's a big, fat, fake scam and it stinks. Now that we've established this guy pushes Zango videos from the car-chick site, do you think I'm about to directly tie Zango in with the wonderfully deceptive Paris Hilton site? Well, take a wild guess.

If you stagger around the Paris Hilton site like a drunken lunatic long enough and check out the Wallpapers section, look who's doing the funky chicken:

Bam! Seekmo AKA Zango is announced with what is quite possibly the funniest line of all time - ACCESS PARIS HILTON FOR FREE....insert crude comment here, originality bonus points if your comment isn't along the lines of "who hasn't?"...and so we see Zango involved with yet another affiliate who is performing installs of other software that leaves a lot to be desired.

The connection doesn't end there, though.

If you go check out one of the (many) subdomains of the Paris Hilton website, you'll see pages on everybody from Beyonce to Gisele Bundchen. The content of those pages, however, is somewhat of a lottery.

On some pages, you'll see Zango videos galore (such as on the Britney and Beyonce pages). On others, you'll open up a big can of whoopass on your system with the Dollar Revenue bundles - as you can see from the (click to enlarge, lol) screenshot.

...gotta' love that virtual machine detection. However, even with that running, I still got all kinds of crappy tools installed and the virtual machine died a horrible death.

It's also worth mentioning that these sites play up a strong Yahoo Groups theme (in fact, the Paris Hilton site has Yahoo domainservers) - but the thing that really interests me is Zango's angle on this. I mean, we keep hearing about disclosure and notice and acts cleaned up and blargh blargh a blargh.

Well, here's a webmaster who pushes Zango videos alongside a whole bunch of completely deceptive installs dressed up as non-existent videos with no notice, EULA or red flashing thing that bounces across your frontpage and warns you of impending danger, Will Robinson.

I don't know about you, but if I see a screenshot of Windows Media Player, and a picture inside that media player, and you're allowed to click it then I should damn well be able to play it.

Doh.