FTC Goes Undercover Against Fake Antivirus Companies

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a legal complaint against two companies based in Cyprus on Wednesday that it claims are behind a wave of malicious pop-ups that trick people into downloading a fake piece of antivirus software that generated tens of millions of dollars for its operators, according to court records. From a report: The scam also involved misrepresenting results on malware repository VirusTotal as infections on the user's own computer. (Update: after the publication of this piece the FTC announced that Restoro and Reimage will pay $26 million to settle the FTC's charges.)

The move is the latest from the FTC in a series of actions in the privacy and cybersecurity space. In January, the FTC banned a data broker called X-Mode from selling sensitive location data after I revealed it was harvesting location data from Muslim prayer and dating apps. In this case, the FTC says it went "undercover" against the two related companies, called Restoro and Reimage, to buy the deceiving software and have phone calls with company representatives. "Since at least January 2018, Defendants have operated a tech support scheme that has bilked tens of millions of dollars from consumers, particularly older consumers," the FTC's complaint reads. The complaint is seeking a permanent injunction against the two companies as well as monetary relief.

CIA

[alvinrod]

I think we should just let the CIA use the assholes that run these sites as practice. I'm sure a few of these bad actors are in the employ of foreign states, but most aren't and at a certain point this shit starts to approach acts of war. I'm not going to lose any sleep if some jerk that rips off old ladies is gruesomely killed with a hammer, possibly slowly over the course of several days or in ways that might be described as "creative" use of the tool.

Re: CIA

[Z00L00K]

Most anti-virus solutions are also reactive, and in the world today it's not enough.

Re:

[olmsfam]

pro-active is worse. The amount of software bugs and support tickets from "heuristic" and "ai driven" detections is obnoxious. Machines run worse than if infected by malware.

Had one just the other day. Sage 50, the worlds most common accounting software for small businesses' gets flagged as suspicious and fails to update. But is only partially blocked so now it s a complete reinstall....

OooOOOooo "settlements" and "injuctions"

[PJ6]

That will definitely stop it.

This struck close to home for me.

[voxelman]

Last year these criminals stole over $40,000 from one of my relatives. Local law enforcement told her that there was nothing they could do.