Movieland Injects Customers With System-Crippling Spyware

Dear Corporate America – when the revolution comes, the CEOs of those companies that have injected their customers’ computers full of spyware are going to be gang-injected by the mob of skinheads with the Anarchy symbols etched by razor blade into their own foreheads. So Movieland’s executives might want to practice holding their ankles and some gnarly yogic rectal relaxation techniques now.

“I am receiving pop-up video from movieland.com that tell me I’m ‘legally obligated to pay, now that your free trial is up’ and I never ordered anything from the Website,” said Michael of Wheeling, W.V., in an October 2005 complaint to ConsumerAffairs.Com

“This video overrides all other functions on my computer until it is finished and the reminder keeps coming back every day,” he said.

The pop-up windows repeatedly admonish the user that they are violating the terms of service agreement with Movieland, and advise that they need to pay money in order to stop the pop-ups from appearing. A link is provided to offer the consumer’s credit card information.

At one point at a board meeting is a marketing executives plan to destroy one of their customer’s most expensive possessions get met with unanimous booyeahs? To be fair to Movieland, they deny the charges – which they would – and the article mentions that there seems to be some correlation between Movieland’s trial and some free screensaver that the users have downloaded, so it’s possible that this is actually some third-party scam, like those “Change your Paypal details now!” spams. But I don’t think anyone at this point is surprised that yet another corporation is acting as scummy as an anonymous Gabonese scammer somewhere.

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