Zynga To Shut Down Farmville!?

San Francisco, CA: The popular online game, Farmville, created for Facebook by California based Zynga Games, has been added to a list of game applications that will soon be shut down. The rumored shut down will take place around June 1st, 2010. Farmville, that ever so quirky game where users build small communities in the form of farms. It’s a social experiment dipped steeply in social media and is addicting.

According to a source inside the corporate offices on Vermont Street in San Francisco, the game had become too addictive and is full of backdoors that allow too much in the way of Internet hacking. Millions of people play the game, usually through it’s Facebook application and many of those millions are addicted to the game.

“It’s so addictive, it can cost you money, not to mention a loss of sleep, focus and even family and friends.”, the source is quoted as saying. One young boy, in the UK, spent roughly $1,400 and it was billed over a two week period during a part of Farmville that allows users to spend real cash to get virtual money in order to buy items for their farm.  He wiped out his own savings before ringing up the rest on his mothers credit card.

Phishing and hacking incidents are also numerous. Several players have complained about passwords being phished or stolen after adding friends to be “neighbors” in Farmville. Several hoaxes have also disrupted game play as players take the time to post about virus warnings which turn out to be false.

“A virus warning circulating among players of FarmVille is a hoax, security experts have warned.

The hoax message, which claims that malware is being spread by links which offer players the ability to send three eggs at once, supposedly comes from Norton – a brand name used by security firm Symantec.

However, security experts said that the hoax message could be causing just as much disruption to players as a real virus would, and warned players not to circulate it.”, said our source.

Both pharming and phishing are methods used to steal personal information from unsuspecting people over the Internet.

Phishing typically involves fraudulent bulk e-mail messages that guide recipients to legitimate-looking but fake Web sites and try to get them to supply personal information like account passwords.

Pharming tampers with the domain-name server system so that traffic to a Web site is secretly redirected to a different site altogether, even though the browser seems to be displaying the Web address you wanted to visit.

“Many organizations aren’t alerted that their site is being pharmed in time to alert and protect their customers and many more organizations have no way to show their examiners and IT committee that their pharming defense solution is compliant.”, says the source. “Based on a look at our own defenses, it was decided to shut the game down as the problems had become too numerous.

Of course, this entire article was created as an experiment to see how freaked out Farmville users would get when given the news that it will be shut down.  It’s totally fictitious and untrue.   If I have created mass hysteria, I have succeeded in my plans for the day. No word yet on the fate of Cafe World.