New York Paralegal Blog

An operator of an online “scareware” scheme will pay more than $8 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that he used deceptive ads to trick consumers into thinking their computers were infected with malicious software, and then sold them software to “fix” their non-existent problem. As part of the FTC’s ongoing efforts to protect consumers from online scams, the agency cracked down on the scareware operation, filing a complaint against seven defendants who allegedly operated the scheme in 2008. The agency charged that the defendants did business using the company names Innovative Marketing, Inc. and ByteHosting Internet Services, LLC, operated using a variety of aliases, and maintained offices in various countries.

CHICAGO—An international cybercrime scheme caused Internet users in more than 60 countries to purchase more than one million bogus software products, causing victims to lose more than $100 million, according to a federal indictment returned here against a Cincinnati area man and two other men believed to be living abroad. The charges allege that the defendants, through fake advertisements placed on various legitimate companies’ websites, deceived Internet users into falsely believing that their computers were infected with “malware” or had other critical errors to induce them to purchase “scareware” software products that had limited or no ability to remedy the purported, but nonexistent, defects. The alleged scheme is widely regarded as one of the fastest-growing and most prevalent types of Internet fraud. Two defendants, Bjorn Daniel Sundin, and Shaileshkumar P. Jain, with others owned and operated Innovative Marketing, Inc. (IM), a company registered in Belize that purported to se...