Scam! Scam! Scam!

A former top PR person at Microsoft has apparently jumped ship to do PR for 180solutions, a company considered one of the worst offenders of surreptitious installs. 180solutions has been trying to clean up its spyware reputation ever since it convinced some clueless VCs to invest $40 million in the company without even realizing why the company was so hated.

However, so far, its reputation is still pretty dirty, as the company was also caught stealing affiliate program commissions by slipping in its own affiliate codes to URLs, and, more recently, buying its largest distributor, who was often accused of causing the sneaky installs. This last move, in particular, is quite questionable. Why did the company reward a distributor it felt was doing questionable things by buying them out? Wouldn't it have made a lot more sense to simply cut the company off as a distributor, if they were really serious about avoiding sneaky installs?

It seems like this particular PR person has plenty of questions to answer.