“If you were distressed when the popular-but-somehow-controversial Flappy Bird was removed from Apple’s App Store and Google Play over the weekend, there are plenty of people looking to profit from your despair,” Andrew Cunningham reports for Ars Technica.
“Since the game was pulled, thousands of iPhones have cropped up on eBay advertising that they’ve got the game installed, with prices ranging from the hundreds into the tens of thousands,” Cunningham reports. “As with any eBay gold rush, many of the listings (and the bids on the listings) are bound to be fraudulent. It didn’t take long for Ars Gaming Editor Kyle Orland to find a whole mess of suspicious-looking completed listings, all sold for several thousand dollars by accounts with little or no feedback.”
“According to the LA Times, some of the Flappy Bird phone listings have been canceled by eBay for violating the site’s policies. One seller received an e-mail message from eBay stating that “smartphones and tablets must be restored to factory settings” before they can be listed, which of course involves deleting any data and applications stored on the devices,” Cunningham reports. “The policy is only apparently being enforced in some cases, though…”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Why ‘Flappy Bird’ creator Dong Nguyen pulled his game – permanently – February 11, 2014
‘Flappy Bird’ creator pulls game from App Store – February 9, 2014
Only stupid will buy .
It’s one of those rare and wonderful litmus tests for STUPID. 😀
I don’t get it! Wouldn’t you have to sell your iDevice with your account intact? Someone explain the logic to me along with who in their right mind would pay that kind of money for a worthless game?
Some people are stupid.
(Not you – the hopeful sellers and buyers paying over the odds for a phone)
No, you could cancel your account (iTunes) so that the new owner could not access your account. Or just change your password, but that is less secure obviously.
Of course the main point to highlight is that even if you got good at this game, it’s pretty shit.
Thousands?
Perhaps that’s the plan. Get thousands of stupid people to hand over their personal details because they don’t understand how to properly wipe their phones…
Thousands flock to sell, no one flocks to buy.
What if they gave a war and no one came?
Meanwhile, con artist Dong Nguyen is
LAUGHING HIS ASS OFF!
This has to be THE SUCKER EVENT OF THE YEAR
I’m just pointing that out so you can hate on ME instead of yourselves for being suckers. Doesn’t that feel better? 🙄
Really? It gets even BETTER?!
Dead Flappy Bird’s REANIMATED CORPSE may spread malware PLAGUE
Cybercrooks latch onto app flap with trojan pestilence
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/12/flappy_bird_trojan_flap/
My kind of news!
Cybercrooks have been quick to latch onto the hype about Flappy Bird’s demise by laying a variety of malware-based traps.
Counterfeit Flappy Bird Android apps packing malware have been spotted all over the web, with sightings by both Trend Micro and Sophos, among others.
Trend warns that counterfeit copies of the mobile game send text messages to premium rate numbers, thereby ringing up unwanted charges to victims’ bills. Counterfeit versions of Flappy Bird are “especially rampant in app markets in Russia and Vietnam,” Trend Micro warns.
More malware can be expected to follow. 😈
There is no reason to believe that Dong Nguyen scammed anybody. Do you have any reason to believe he was involved in selling these phones?
The folks at Kotaku who published an article implying that he misappropriated Nintendo graphics have _apologized_ and admitted that it doesn’t look like he did anything wrong.
http://kotaku.com/the-flappy-bird-fiasco-1519938266
Basically, the dude made a very difficult and silly, but apparently somewhat addictive, game. Eventually he couldn’t handle the media frenzy and took it down. It sounds like he made quite a bit of money, but it doesn’t sound like he did anything wrong.
Derek, I’m usually with you when you call out corrupt corporations (redundant?) and governments, but this guy isn’t some big institution. It seems like he’s just a guy who got lucky, then didn’t want to deal with the typical viral-event nonsense. 🙂
This subject is too bizarro for me to touch any further. If this Dong dude has you hypnotized, you’re on your own. Seek deprogramming.
I could not be more pleased to live outside the box, because it’s fracking weird inside the box this week.