In June 2010, several players noticed that a package file was attaching itself to other packages in The Sims 3. The file was a corrupted girl doll object titled "Girl Doll Dressed", which was incorrectly cloned from the Teddy bear. Game installations became "infected" by players downloading lots, houses or Sims with the hidden doll attached, similar to how computer viruses spread, and the doll was determined to cause longer loading times and game crashes. Players then unknowingly uploaded these infected packages to The Exchange, the game's online custom content workshop, causing it to spread to even more players.

Many Sims community sites began reporting the issue and one user posted a guide on how to manually remove the doll from the game to prevent the glitch from spreading, and a SimGuru on EA's official Sims forum eventually responded with a stickied post informing the community about the issue, and stated that EA would patch the game in the future to institute measures preventing corrupted objects from being uploaded to The Exchange.