Posted on 12/13/2008 8:59:31 AM PST by Sgt_Schultze
A Baltimore federal court judge ordered six absent defendants yesterday - including one from Maryland - to shut down Internet businesses that the Federal Trade Commission claims are part of a vast $100 million "scareware" scheme that tricked more than a million people into purchasing useless security software by making them think their computers were under attack.
"The evidence in this case is quite overwhelming," said U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett.
He also extended a freeze on the defendants' assets and signed an order requiring them to show why they shouldn't be held in contempt of court for missing the hearing and ignoring an earlier restraining order.
Bennett promised he would issue arrest warrants within five days if this round of orders in the civil case is ignored.
"People are hiding out," he said. "The time for hiding out will be over as of 4 o'clock next Wednesday."
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
/mark
No kidding. I fell for one back in my new to the net days.
Great- now the scareware makers are goign to go for a bailout from congress
Probably Libertarians.
Forget the industry - hang the offenders.
What a cash cow; create and distribute malware then cure it for a price! I had a repeated notice disguised as an internet explorer warning that I had an infection; but my daily scans on my anti-virus software showed none.
An update from IE cured it.
Somehow, these nasty scammers got into my computer, too. Every two minutes a box would come up, warning of 32 “critical threats” to my computer. To remove them, you had a choice. Type in your email address or use pay-pal. That is when I called my ‘Geek Boy’. He said this bug is keeping him running from dawn to dusk, to remove the virus from his client’s computers.
And, guess what? It said it was a warning from “Windows”.
xp anti-virus 2009? very common malware that I have seen spread like an epidemic as of late. Extremely difficult to remove also.
I’m not proud to say that I allowed anti-virus 2009 into my computer (I didn’t pay for the “protection” but) allowed it to “scan” my computer.
I then got suspicious and read about it. I was able to remove it after following some instructions on a geek website.
#*%!
Yes - that was the one, I’m fairly sure! It only took my computer tech about fifteen minutes to remove. He told me he is spending his entire day removing this thing. I asked him how I could have gotten it and he didn’t know. He just knew that almost all of his several hundred clients had been infected.
I got warnings like this a few days ago. Norton couldn’t find anything, updates didn’t help. Eventually I gleaned enough from the geek forums discussing it that I was able to remove it manually. That involved finding the file (it was named “Google” and was a hidden folder), renaming it so it wouldn’t keep running automatically (you can’t delete a file that’s in use), rebooting with the network cable unplugged (otherwise it would try to run still, throwing out error messages saying “File not found”, which was apparently enough to be considered still “in use”) and then finally I was able to delete the whole Google folder.
As a non-techie, I was proud of myself.
Ping!
Running Linux does make me immune to much of this crap. Running browsers OTHER than IE will help. Running other than Outlook will help.
If one of them DOES pop up due to browsing to a page under Linux I know it’s false just because I have no scanner running (I know what the OS is doing.. open source don’t ya know..)
It’s called peace of mind. ;-)
No.
Scaremongering is more of a Republican thing.
Being selfish and taking advantage of the weak is a Libertarian thing.
Don't keep up on things much do you?
Ever heard of the Bail outs?
Another Republican thing.
Of course spreading lies about Libertarians is also a Republican thing.
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