Like millions of people across the country, Rebecca Swift of Santa Cruz has lost money playing social games on Facebook.
Like millions of people across the country, Rebecca Swift of Santa Cruz has lost money playing social games on Facebook. Most egregiously, she signed up for a free trial of green tea to get some virtual cash for one game, only to find that she was charged $165 for tea pill and tea bags. But Swift is fighting back. She is one of hundreds of people who have joined a class action lawsuit against Facebook and its advertiser Zynga, which hosts many of the social networking games.
Zynga is currently valued at $1 billion, but its CEO Mark Pincus and his partners at Facebook could be forced to pay its players $5 million to compensate for their losses. Pincus once admitted on a Youtube video that he “needed revenues right ****ing now,” so he did “every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away.” Even he couldn’t get rid of one of the toolbars he was getting his users to download.
Facebook denies any involvement in the scam: “The ads in question appeared in third-party applications, were not from Facebook and provided no benefit to Facebook,” said a spokeswoman. The problem is that Facebook allows Zynga players to play the games for free from its platform, and often the players are scammed. “Rebecca was appalled when she realized that she had been charged without her consent,” said attorney John R. Parker Jr., who has taken up the case. And she is one of thousands.
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