The world famous spyware company Zango, formerly known as 180 Solutions and Hotbar, has acquired the browser based comparison shopping engine Smart Shopper for $9 million, a move that makes Zango even more dangerous. Zango software is listed as Spyware or "Adware" by Symantec and McAfee states that their software "may have legitimate uses", but describes it as a "potentially unwanted program", and an "adware downloader".
 
Smart Shopper Networks was previously owned by New York based HotBar Inc, another company that comes up as a spyware producer according to a search of Google.

The Smart Shopper comparison shopping engine offers now what appears to be a fairly non-threatening shopping assistant add-on for Internet Explorer, the main target browser for Zango. In reality Zango is well-known to deliver adware that delivers advertisements and is difficult to remove. StopBadware.org, a website run by the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Oxford University's Oxford Internet Institute, lists a number of undesirable behaviors associated with Zango. Some of their software "behaves as spyware"as it "automatically runs on startup" and "displays pop-up advertisements" and also "installs adware". Zango`s "bundled software cannot be closed".