Maybe it’s time to give stiffer penalties than fines to online deceivers—sounds like companies like Zango just consider them a cost of doing business. The company’s most recent attempt to put Adware on unsuspecting kids’ computers comes in the form of an online Batman game.

Christopher Boyd at FaceTime Security Labs Blog gives the play-by-play of following an ad appearing on a comics website promising a free online batman game. What it leads to, though, is an demo of a 7-year-old game, a lot of lies along the way, and some Zango adware for your efforts. The website it comes from is registered anonymously—i.e., not to DC Comics or Warners Brothers—and is devoid of any licensing information from WB whatsoever.

Zango would probably say this is the work of an affiliate and not them, and if something like this happened just one time we might believe them. Fact is, it’s happened time and time again. Zango was fined $3 million by the FTC in 2006 for secretly installing adware and making it impossible to remove.

Stipulations in that settlement were subsequently ignored, and trouble popped up at Warner Brothers site when it became obvious that downloading Zango games could expose kids to porno ads (WB subsequently removed their Zango association), and again later via a Facebook application purporting “secret crushes” to members, who only got adware junk instead.

This pattern of paying regulatory fines but continuing with shady behavior isn’t limited to Zango. Recently we reported the connection between “social network” Tagged.com founder and his former company Jumpstart, which was fined by the FTC in 2006 for violations of the CAN-SPAM Act. And yet, Tagged continues to dupe people into giving them access to their entire email inbox.

There’s a reason insider traders like Martha Stewart (first and most famous one that comes to mind) are sent to jail for insider trading. Used to be they were fined for shady business practices, but they kept doing it because the fine was just worked in to their business expenses and judged against profit. Jail time became necessary.

Obviously, the FTC fines aren’t working on companies like Zango. 
 

But also, with scammers like this out there in cyber space it makes it really difficult for legitimate advertisers trying to get people to click on their special offers. If the consumer is conditioned to distrust all banners, no wonder they won’t click on them!