I had issues using Amazon.com and Amazon.de with Chromium. The back button did not work at all and some account pages did not work as always kept being redirected to the previous page. When trying to analyze these issue I saw that all amazon pages got &tag=chrome0f-21 appended to their URLs, and that this probably caused the redirects killing the back button. But where did this come from?
Googling for chrome0f-21 found only one page guessing that some Chrome extension might be the culprit. But which one? I suspected Ghostery, but after disabling it, Amazon still got manipulated. So I simply grep'ped for chrome0f-21 in the extensions directory, and luckily one JavaScript file was found. I thought that people so insidious would also be so clever to obfuscate such searchable texts.
The culprit in my case was "Web Browser Switcher for Chrome" from "Chrome Heaven". I read the description in the Chrome Store, but there was no mentioning of this way of money making. I tested two other extensions from "Chrome Heaven", namely "HTML5 Cookies Pro Offline" and "Webmail Ad Blocker", and both contained the Javascript file for Amazon manipulation.
The manipulates Amazon sites are:
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Amazon.com (Affiliate Code "donations09-20")
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Amazon.ca (chrome0f-20)
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Amazon.co.uk (chrome03-21)
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Amazon.de (chrome0f-21)
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Amazon.es (chrome0a-21)
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Amazon.fr (chrome08-21)
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Amazon.it (chrome07-21)
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Amazon.co.jp (chrome00-22)
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Amazon.cn (chrome0a-23)
Probably they (Chrome Heaven) are also stealing real affiliate traffic from other sites. It looks like their code does some checking if there is already something set, but this is not working. I wouldn't be surprised if their apps were also only copies of other extensions.
I reported one extension to Google, let's see if Google is reacting. I will also report these apps to Amazon if i find out where i can do this. Effectively they are stealing money from Amazon.
And once again Google forced me to create a hangouts account, otherwise i couldn't report the extension.
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