Our crawler browses for Beltronics products on a virtual computer running Zango adware. Zango opens a large popup to a LinkShare affiliate link (with ID ViwbtLFssq0), redirecting to Beltronics. See also a screenshot of the resulting on-screen display.
The underlying browser window shares cookies with the popup. Thus, if the user makes a purchase from Beltronics, in either window, this affiliate ViwbtLFssq0 gets paid a commission.
Violations: Adware, popup, forced click.
POST http://tv. ... .com/showme.aspx?ver=1.0.8.0&pkg_ver=1.0.8.0&rnd=20 HTTP/1.0
Accept: image/gif, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, image/pjpeg, application/x-shockwave-flash, application/x-ms-application, application/x-ms-xbap, application/vnd.ms-xpsdocument, application/xaml+xml, */*
Accept-Language: en-us
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store
User-Agent: ...
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Length: 22543
Host: tv. ... .com
Pragma: no-cache
epostdata=...
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 23:50:07 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Cache-Control: private, no-store
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 22164
Connection: Close
Proxy-Connection: Close
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML>
<body>
ad_url: <input id=ad_url name=ad_url value=http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=ViwbtLFssq0&offerid=181098.10000001&type=3&subid=0&keyword=beltronics><br>
ad_width: <input id=ad_width name=ad_width value=800><br>
ad_height: <input id=ad_height name=ad_height value=600><br>
ad_top: <input id=ad_top name=ad_top value=156><br>
ad_left: <input id=ad_left name=ad_left value=209><br>
ad_takefocus: <input id=ad_takefocus name=ad_takefocus value=y><br>
ad_activationdelay: <input id=ad_activationdelay name=ad_activationdelay value=0><br>
ad_resizable: <input id=ad_resizable name=ad_resizable value=y><br>
ad_scrollbars: <input id=ad_scrollbars name=ad_scrollbars value=y><br>
ad_menubar: <input id=ad_menubar name=ad_menubar value=y><br>
ad_statusbar: <input id=ad_statusbar name=ad_statusbar value=y><br>
ad_toolbar: <input id=ad_toolbar name=ad_toolbar value=y><br>
ad_addressbar: <input id=ad_addressbar name=ad_addressbar value=y><br>
ad_fullscreen: <input id=ad_fullscreen name=ad_fullscreen value=n><br>
ad_statustext: <input id=ad_statustext name=ad_statustext value=><br>
ad_theatermode: <input id=ad_theatermode name=ad_theatermode value=n><br>
ad_id: <input id=ad_id name=ad_id value=11066317><BR>
keyword_id: <input id=keyword_id name=keyword_id value=58599164><BR>
<INPUT ID=cap_link_text_2 TYPE=text VALUE="This ad served by ... . Click here to learn more."><br>
<INPUT ID=cap_link_target TYPE=text VALUE="http://www. ... .com"><br>
<INPUT ID=ad_te_page TYPE=text VALUE="http://event.zroitracker.com/te.aspx?s=145&eid=2000&sdata=..."><br>
<INPUT ID=ad_shown TYPE=text VALUE="y"><br>
<INPUT ID=data1 TYPE=text VALUE="...">
</body>
</HTML>
GET http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=ViwbtLFssq0&offerid=181098.10000001&type=3&subid=0&keyword=beltronics HTTP/1.0
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en-us
User-Agent: ...
Host: click.linksynergy.com
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Set-Cookie: lsn_statp=3ieO1CAAAABYi6Rxjj1P3A%3D%3D; Domain=.linksynergy.com; Expires=Sat, 11-Dec-2032 23:50:11 GMT; Path=/
Set-Cookie: lsn_qstring=ViwbtLFssq0%3A181098%3A; Domain=.linksynergy.com; Expires=Mon, 17-Dec-2012 23:50:11 GMT; Path=/
Set-Cookie: lsn_track=UmFuZG9tSVb1SdNZdeUAENlfvOBL%2BJVDqpZ60I4pL4Po64RGZ2rDvW1fpom6NRk7k9T8PPR6Wfk74ZdK%2FasT1Q%3D%3D; Domain=.linksynergy.com; Expires=Wed, 14-Dec-2022 23:50:11 GMT; Path=/
Set-Cookie: lsclick_mid35608="2012-12-16 23:50:11.428|ViwbtLFssq0-T7JVoaL6BZFsSmXm8xWu1w"; Domain=.linksynergy.com; Expires=Tue, 16-Dec-2014 23:50:11 GMT; Path=/
P3P: policyref="/w3c/p3p.xml", CP="NOI DSP COR CURa ADMa DEVa OUR BUS STA"
Expires: Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT
Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2012 23:50:11 GMT
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Location: http://www.beltronics.com/linkshare?siteID=ViwbtLFssq0-T7JVoaL6BZFsSmXm8xWu1w&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.beltronics.com%2F%3Futm_source%3Dlinkshare%26utm_medium%3Daffiliate%26utm_campaign%3Dbelmain
Content-Length: 0
Cneonction: close
Connection: Keep-Alive
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive