The Ftc recently settled against a FakeAv purveyor. While this settlement won’t remove all of the variants out there, it is welcome news nonetheless with ongoing progress and the caselist here. The fewer distributors of XP Antivirus the better: “The two settling defendants were part of a massive deceptive advertising scheme that tricked more than a million consumers into buying “rogue” computer security products, including WinFixer, WinAntivirus, DriveCleaner, ErrorSafe, and XP Antivirus, according to the FTC’s complaint.” ThreatFire users were protected from a number of these scareware software packages, including XP Antivirus, in high volumes within the community back in mid-2008 and earlier.
The FTC’s complaint from December calls this stuff scareware, also called “rogueware”. It’s amazing how many users really fell for and continue to fall for this stuff, and then cannot get their money back. According to the complaint:
“Unaware of the Defendants’ trickery, more than one million consumers have purchased the Defendants’ software products to cure their computers of the non-existent problems “detected” by the Defendants’ fake scans…
Although some consumers later realize they have been defrauded by Defendants and attempt to seek refunds, Defendants routinely delay, obstruct and refuse to honor such requests.”
