The problem is, while VLC is developed as a not-for-profit open source project, other companies are taking advantage of its popularity to distribute adware and spyware. If you want to then the official versions are available at the website–the organization composed of volunteers who develop the media player. However, if you do a search for VLC on the top two search engines: Google or Bing, a number of malicious links appear alongside the official VideoLan page.
These other links are put there by companies that want you to download their modified version of VLC that includes adware and spyware. They trade on the good name of VLC in order to infect your system and then start earning money from you and your machine. The VideoLan team faces two major problems because of this: the first is their software being associated with malicious activity and being flagged by antivirus software as such, and the second being the search engines apparently not willing to do much about it.
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Ludovic Fauvet, one of the developers working at VideoLan, has done a blog post about the extent of these malicious alternative versions of VLC. He lists 18 common URLs that appear in search results for VLC, all of which include crapware/adware/spyware. By far the most common are associated with pinballcorp.com, eorezo.com and tut4pc.com (do not visit them). The reason they manage to get so high up on the search listings is because they are willing to pay for adwords.
At the same time, Fauvet states that asking Google to remove these links turns out to be pointless because “Google ignore us, they’re making money with these scams.” While VideoLan will continue to try its best to stop such links appearing and educate users, we call on the search engines to do more and stop them completely. As consumers, we can all do our part by ensuring we always download from the official link and by encouraging others to do the same whenever possible, especially those people you know who really couldn’t tell that vlc-download.com or vlc.us.com are malicious links. Read more at.