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FTC Shuts Down Fraudulent Antispyware Company

Posted by timothy on from the click-here-to-remove-viruses dept.

spewey writes "The Federal Trade Commission has shut down MaxTheater, Inc., alleging the company participated in fraudulent practices with its Spyware Assassin site, which purportedly scanned user machines for spyware and reported infections, even though no scan was done and in most cases, the user machine was clean. The site then offered the user a $30 product to remove the spyware, which the commission reports 'didn't do a thing.'"

6 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. More like this by northcat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Don't all those ads saying "Your computer is infected! Clean it now!" (or something like that) and "Windows is running slow! speed it up Blah blah blah bullshit bullshit" fall into this same category?

  2. Re:Clean Machines? by thesnarky1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    After I do a sweep of my system using McAffe, Zone Alarm, and Ad-aware, mine's pretty sqeeky clean. At least enough to know the 121 infections it reported had to be false.

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    Want to find other gamers to play board and role playing game
  3. Re:No message? by freshman_a · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Since some people seem to take everything posted on /. as 100% fact, I'd like to point out (as many other's did in that articles' comments) that it probably wasn't a hoax.

    a) The MPAA said themselves that they were taking action again LokiTorrent. Google cache here.

    b) I've also read that there was an entry in PACER about the lawsuit as well.

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    Slackware
  4. Mr. Nice Guys by caferace · · Score: 2, Interesting

    These are the guys that made Spyware Assassin. Their other products should be next...

  5. Re:Clean Machines? by blanks · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My business laptop which I only use for work and development has never had any type of infection on it.

    I dont download freeware, or any software really, everything is installed from cd.

    I dont use p2p, torrents etc. dont need it so I dont use it.

    I only visit about 30 websites, all of which I trust, everything else is set to be un trusted.

    anti virus, firewall, and security permissions set to high.

    Its really simple to keep your machine clean, as long as you keep the idea of infections at the top of your list of what to watch for.

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    TruePunk | Games
  6. It's a good thing it did nothing... by MadAnthony02 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sure, Spyware Assasian did nothing, but there are even worse pseudo-anitspyware products out there. The article links to this chart, where PC Mag found spyware removal tools that added additional spyware or did things that aren't real good for Windows, like delete one of the driver folders.

    So it looks like there are even shadier companies out there

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    I have blog like everyone else