Three men who made more than $100 million selling scareware have been charged by the FBI. They sold their fake antivirus programs in over 60 countries. The programs they sold that we published articles about are; “Malware Alarm“, “Antivirus 2008” and “VirusRemover 2008“.
Scareware has been on the rise since 2008 and it continues to be the bread winner amongst scams. Scareware tricks users into thinking their computers are infected with viruses and or malware, and in order to remove the infection, a user must purchase the products license. In most cases, the victims visit particular websites and they are then urged to purchase scareware products such as; anti-spyware and antivirus products.
Such fraud was essentially outlawed at the end of 2008, when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) got a US court to prevent two manufacturers of scareware from continuing to sell their products. The three men now facing charges did business from the US and the Ukraine via such companies as “Byte Hosting Internet Services” and “Innovative Marketing”.
Facts: 15 percent of all malware is now scareware and that this percentage is still rising.
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The FBI and FTC may never stop the distribution of scareware all together, but charging these three men is a step in the right direction.
Hope to see many more comments from you.
Great post! Thanks for sharing all of these great tutorials/ideas.tnkss hi..
Good luck with this first step taken against stopping all these scareware practices. I really hope they will succeed in eradicating this kind of bad behavior online.