Scareware. A little nasty program telling you that your computer has
problems, where none are really. In most cases it’s better to trust Anti-Virus
pioneers and some system fixing software (some of them are even freeware!)
to determine your PC’s status.

One programmer thought that it could be a gold adder to grab onto and programmed a software that told many users (in this case around one million users!) that their computer has malware and virusses on them where normally are none of them. A payment of about 130 Dollars allows the download of a software that “identifies” and deletes these problems.

What some software does for free without faking messages, the scareware does for a high price with some bogus messages and well-prepared homepages offering all kinds of payment methods. But one should be very sceptic if Western Union and some rather unknown Credit Card transaction providers are involved in this fraudulent game.

In Sweden now one of the providers got caught and sentenced for 4 years in jail for providing a service that makes scareware business having a legal face. Involved in this was also the FBI which followed this game for quite some time.

While 980.000 users have been ripped off 71 million dollars in total, the FBI then took action and finally has shutdown that payment service and brought it’s owner behind bars.

Yet you can say that it’s only a drop on the hot stone when you look at the uncountable number of fraudulent pages. ..