Free Republic

May 19, 2016 FTC expands tech support fraud lawsuit Keith Griffin The Federal Trade Commission has added three new defendants to an ongoing case against a tech support scam with ties to Connecticut. The scheme allegedly bilked consumers out of tens of millions of dollars by pretending to represent Microsoft, Apple, and other major tech companies. Back in November, the Connecticut attorney general's office joined in the FTC action along with the state of Pennsylvania in a request to shut down a tech support scam operating out of Essex and two locations in Pennsylvania that allegedly scammed consumers out of...

The Internet is lighting up with warnings about Superfish, an adware program that came preinstalled on many Lenovo laptops in the past six months. Like a lot of the bloatware that comes on new computers, Superfish exists to help push advertising, not to serve any real consumer need. That would be annoying enough, but Superfish seriously undermines the user's safety, according to many security experts. Superfish is a piece of third-party software that Lenovo installed to, as it says in its apology to consumers, “enhance the shopping experience.” That means it's meant to help advertisers target potential customers. But security...

An unknown hacker has been on a Search Engine Optimization rampage to flood search engines with more than a million ways to infect yourself with his virus. This is the first major "Scareware" infection we've seen since writing about the Federal Trade Commission's action in our December 10th blog post, FTC Moves Against Fake Anti-Virus Scareware. The current scam takes advantage of the thousands of websites which have a "URL redirect" on them. A URL redirection program allows the website owner to "send you" to another website, while keeping track of where you went. They are often used in conjunction...