“Scareware” Scammer Gets Caught, Fined over $160 Million

This one will make today a happy Thursday for you. :)

“Scareware” is stuff you see on the internet where people are literally tricked into buying certain software that supposedly ‘protects’ your computer from ‘bad stuff’ when in fact it really does nothing at all. And yeah, this has been going on a good long time.

Well, one of the ‘companies’ that’s been doing this for close to a decade has been caught and fined a whopping $163 million by the FTC.

The article states the company has the ‘company’ took in more than $60 million in revenue for all the time they’ve been in ‘business’. Will they ever be able to pay all that? Probably not. The goal was most likely to clean them out hardcore-style so they never do business on the internet again. And it’s safe to say that they won’t.

As for how this ‘company’ was caught, this is a situation where the little guy won. The FTC investigation started because of 3,000+ scam complaints. This just goes to show that yes, your voice does matter.

On a final note, if you happen to have any of the ‘protection’ software listed on that article installed on your PC, um.. yeah, you’d better uninstall it. However I would keep the installer file if you have it just for computer historical purposes. In a few years you could install it in a sandbox environment, maybe make a screencast video and narrate it with something like, “Remember THIS nonsense?!” ;)

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