14 DAY TRIAL // Recently, yet another suit hit Facebook, and this time it is caused by various game advertisements that scammed numerous users. The second defendant in this federal class-action lawsuit is Zynga, and the two companies are requested to pay more than $5 million to the social network users who had been scammed through the displayed game ads.
This action was predicted by several voices over the web, since the representatives of a law firm from Sacramento, Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, announced that they were searching for people who had been scammed by the same ads while playing Mafia Wars or Farmville. They were trying to gather enough data to file a class-action suit, and when they found the appropriate information, they went to the federal district court.
In all fairness, it is worth mentioning that neither of the two defendants is the real originator of the advertisements in question. The situation appeared because third-party companies place ads within the Zynga games listed on Facebook, thus generating great revenue for the two companies. The scams are conducted by encouraging users to sign up for unauthorized cell phone charges, as well as highly priced mail order products (such as CDs), which are presented as “free,” “free trials,” or parts of “online quizzes.”
According to Zynga and Facebook officials, the companies obtain up to one-third of their entire revenue using this type of “commercial offers.” Moreover, it is already well known that Zynga CEO confessed that “I did every horrible thing in the book just to get revenues,” which will surely be used against the defendants in court.
Even though both companies are supported by large investors (Facebook is valued at billions of dollars, whereas the elite firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has invested in Zynga), they still use numerous types of advertisements to increase their income. Therefore, if the court rules against them, they will surely be asked to pay great sums of money to compensate for their marketing tactics.