Easy Spyware Tools

There’s been a recent surge in interest with regards the fake Batman MMORPG game from a few weeks ago – meanwhile, the digging has continued and some interesting bits and pieces have come to light.

If you examine the Whois details for some of the sites on the server related to this lot, you quickly find something strange. Despite all of the domains looking and acting the same, some of them are registered anonymously, while the majority have full contact details. As an example, let’s take

adventure-quest-hacks.info

Here are the Whois details for this site – as you can see, this webpage (like a good portion on the server) are registered to a named individual in Canada (as opposed an anonymous registrant like the original Batman MMORPG website). There is a Google Ad at the bottom – however, the publisher ID is different to the ID that was used to roll out the fake Batman game advert so that doesn’t help lead us to the potential identity of the site owner.

The only real thing of note with regards this person in Google is this post, where he’s looking for someone to work with him on a “Browser Based RPG Game” so that’s not much use either.

Of course, there’s no way to know for sure who the fake Batman game website was / is registered to. However, I am curious why there appear to be a number of near-identical sites (in terms of content, the way they’ve been put together and general all-round execution) on the same server registered to this individual. Almost every site on that server has been made in the same way, with a single intention – convince the end-user to install Zango in return for everything ranging from empty lies to near-worthless content that could have been obtained elsewhere.

Is that name there as a placeholder for someone else? Does he own the server but not the sites (and if so, shouldn’t the site owners actually be listed in the Whois details)? Could there be a group of individuals all running a couple of sites each and taking their own split of the profits (which would explain why some sites are tied to names and others are anonymous)?

More importantly, shouldn’t Zango be taking a closer look at the sites listed here and here and (perhaps) canceling those affiliate accounts too?