Bob2002
ULTIMATE Member
Three men are facing federal fraud charges for allegedly raking in more than US$100 million while running an illegal "scareware" business that tricked victims into installing bogus software.
Two of the men, Bjorn Sundin and Shaileshkumar Jain, operated an antivirus company called Innovative Marketing, which sold products such as WinFixer, Antivirus 2008, Malware Alarm and VirusRemover 2008. The third man charged, James Reno, ran Byte Hosting Internet Services, the company that operated Innovative Marketing's call centers.
The company's products generated so many consumer complaints that the FTC brought a civil action against Innovative Marketing and Byte Hosting in 2008, effectively putting them out of business.
On Wednesday, a grand jury in Chicago handed down the criminal charges, meaning the three men now face jail time if convicted.
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/052710-alleged-100m-scareware-sellers-facing.html
Had to remove some scareware from a relative's computer some time ago. Luckily, unlike trojans/viruses/malware it didn't use any tricks to hide itself. I wonder if they'd just stopped scamming after they'd made a few million, rather than a hundred, prosecutors would have noticed/bothered ? :hrmph:























