Talk:Zorpia

What's going on here? This diatribe against Zorpia is completely un-WP. Various neutral reviews treat it as a bona fide social network. It has millions of users. For sure there are one or two other references to bad practices, but this article is totally one-sided and POV. (And I looked up Zorpia because a spammy message made me suspicious!) Onanoff (talk) 15:56, 15 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Any article about them talks about spamming and phishing, unless it is a press release. They've also managed to fill up google searches with their press releases. Bhny (talk) 17:43, 15 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Onanoff, you could try to find neutral reviews, but there aren't quite many of them. Almost all is either originating from Zorpia and related businesses or their credibility is questionable, like "neutral" reviews where the author spend 5 minutes looking around and write his/her article based on these "facts". (When researching I found that most of the "neutral" articles simply base their assumptions on the data Zorpia officially provides, echoing unproven statements without doubt.) In fact it should be mentioned that there are several "social networking sites" which uses personal data for illegal or borderline illegal activities, Zorpia is probably just one of the bigger ones. Having millions of users does not mean they're legitimate. If you can find any proof that all the spamming, phishing, illegal data mining, illegal data preserving and use activities were somehow justified we all are extremely curious about it. Until you do it is extremely hard to see them anything else than the article states, referencing lot of external sources. But maybe it's a clash of cultures, west and east. :-P [I don't believe so.] --grin ✎ 23:24, 17 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Article seems well-balanced to me, considering all the well-sourced evidence for their business practices. --fjarlq (talk) 06:08, 28 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

This article is listed on http://www.schendera.de/wikipedia-firma-eintragen.html as an example for paid work, written by a professional journalist. --Dietzel65 (talk) 14:34, 31 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

Yes it looks like it started that way. It's obviously not promoting the company any more. User:Kabelsalat wrote the original Bhny (talk) 14:47, 31 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

The article looks just great now. I'm happy I have un-speedy-ed it ;-) Based on the feedback it is also a great service to mankind. :-D --grin ✎ 23:08, 1 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

I own a mail server. I have over 13,000 email addresses registered to various email groups. I have seen Zorpia's solicitation emails pass through seldom, but every time, it's to a user from someone who didn't send the invitation. In other words, Zorpia is as the article says, a spammer and data-mining operation. That typically means it's a front for something else, perhaps a money-making email address retailer. To prove that is very difficult, however, if someone wanted to test that proposition, it would be simple: create an email address at a free service and join. If the amount of spam that comes after that increases over the next several weeks to several months, then you can be certain Zorpia is an email address farming organization. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kpearson99 (talk • contribs) 03:07, 11 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

I received invitations from two friends, neither of whom intended to send them to me. I have no idea about them being an "email address retailer," as is said above, but they're definitely trying to grow their network in an unethical manner. I suppose it would be "unbalanced" to say that the company is clearly lying about what it does.

I looked up this article after receiving a highly doubtful "message" from an aquaintance via Zorpia. I am ready to believe that the content of the article is true and relevant, but the wordings are so subjective that I wanted to see this discussion page and now consider this discussion relevant as well. I’d suggest that the article could be rewritten with significantly less subjective tone, an objective tone will be informative enough. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 194.136.97.66 (talk) 18:27, 11 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

The article should ideally not include these "IT'S A TRAP" warnings because they cannot be sourced to anything outside of people's blogs or forums. The original form of the article was not much better, but it at least was not written to be an anti-Zorpia screed.—Ryulong (琉竜) 19:09, 11 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

FWIW, I have received dozens if not hundreds of messages from people I know who clicked a link in a Zorpia email. I never have, so my contacts have not been spammed. The messages are easily identifiable from the summary, because they always mistakenly use the first name twice, as in "You have a private message from Rachel Rachel waiting for you!" Often they are followed by a legit message from the victim with apologies, but messages "from" that victim continue for months (so far). I'm offering this because most other posts here are from 2013; I wanted to let future editors know that the spamming continues in 2016. Sti11w4ter (talk) 17:46, 12 March 2016 (UTC)Reply

The wiki page history has spam notes added then deleted. I think it is useful for the wiki content to mention problems people have, in case they want to check Wikipedia before clicking through a spam/phishing site. I was introduced to Zorpia when they started sending me mail on behalf of an elderly relative. I updated the wiki page to add some references on unsubscribing and checking gmail security settings. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ericjster (talk • contribs) 18:24, 19 July 2017 (UTC)Reply

These parts were removed from the original article because they need reputable sources. You can help by finding them, including reputable writers of blogs or researchers.

Please see https://www.techinasia.com/zorpia-spam-social-network/. Abundantly documents the behavior described here plus several other sneaky dodges. I'm here to begin with because I just now got exactly the kind of phishing email this blog describes, trying to extort from me my contact list as the price for showing me a purported message from a friend. Please use your heads. If that was being done to me, that had been done to my friend as well, and there's no reason whatsoever to think that the email I received is anything but a spam propagated via the email list extorted from my friend. This blog documents that process exactly: the purported messages from his wife and friend were messages they never sent. Crispin miller (talk) 06:03, 17 January 2015 (UTC)Reply

Zorpia is infamous for sending repetitive "private messages" to people who are not users, referring to fake senders who never sent any message, "inviting" people to read those "messages" by joining Zorpia by providing their private data.^{[1][2] [3]} The site metric data (like the number of users) has not been verified by external parties and it has been suggested that the site is using phishing techniques to gather private user data.^[1][4][5] People have been reporting that the account deletion requests are not honoured and their data is continuously used for outbound invitations, and their - supposedly deleted - photographs being shared with others.

Zorpia's official Terms of Service prohibit spamming, defined as any repetitive entries (sensible or insensible) posted multiple times so as to annoy readers.<ref name="zorpiaterms" />

Nevertheless Zorpia has been infamous in violating its own Terms of Service by sending repetitive "private messages" to people who are not users, "inviting" them to read those messages by joining Zorpia.^[1][2][3]

A specific phishing tactic is to use the Gmail login screen during registration, likely using Google's OAuth protocol.^[6] Once the victim has entered his or her Gmail username and password, Zorpia uses this to access the user's contact list and sends out spam in the form of "private messages" to the contact list.^[2] Zorpia will even send the victim messages from the victim. Access to the Gmail contact list can be revoked by going into the Google account settings at accounts.google.com and then clicking "Security". Scroll down to the "Connected applications and sites" section and click "Manage access". Review the sites under "Connected Sites, Apps, and Services" and click "Revoke Access" on any you don't recognize.

This tactic is still very much in use today 12th October 2015. A client of mine has just been caught by this exact description. An email arrives from a "friend" claiming a message is waiting on Zorpia. Clicking the link takes you to the fake Google Page to hoover up the Google password. Zorpia then added a link to its own App into the Google Account. All email addresses are then hoovered out and spammed with an invite claiming a message is waiting. This was clearly Zorpia who had done this due to the choice of contact addresses that had been used. It is thanks to the above paragraph that we knew how to detach Zorpia from its link to the Google Contacts. 82.3.222.152 (talk) 15:22, 12 October 2015 (UTC)Reply

I cannot read Chinese but these sources look somewhat reliable from google translating them. Perhaps someone can use them to expand the article.

• http://big5.51job.com/gate/big5/arts.51job.com/arts/26/333951.html
• http://www.ycwb.com/ycwb/2007-06/22/content_1524553.htm
• http://the-sun.on.cc/channels/news/20070607/20070607015509_0000.html

-- Atlantima ~✿~ (talk) 20:34, 13 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

A significant portion of this article was written by User:Hildred who is a sock puppet of a paid PR firm, see Wikipedia:Long-term_abuse/Morning277. -- Green Cardamom (talk) 20:04, 20 October 2013 (UTC)Reply