District Court in Illinois issued the temporary restraining order on June 28 barring the companies and individual defendants from engaging in such practices, freezing their assets and placing control of the business with a court-appointed receiver. Saying that the FTC and Florida attorney general are “likely to prevail” in their complaint against the companies, the U.S.
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“Once in control of consumers' computers, defendants run a series of purported diagnostic tests, which, in reality, are nothing more than a high-pressured sales pitch designed to scare consumers into believing that their computers are corrupted, hacked, otherwise compromised, or generally performing badly,” the complaints say. “I think it can be pretty significant when you talk about the pop-up ads that cause a consumer’s computer to malfunction,” said James Davis, an attorney in the FTC’s Midwest region who worked on the case.Īccording to the complaint, would-be victims who called the toll-free number also were asked to give the bogus tech support workers remote access to their computers. Some victims, many of them elderly, also were sold ongoing tech support plans ranging in price from $9.99 to $19.99 a month, the agencies said. Those who called in response to the pop-ups were given a high-pressure sales pitch designed to frighten them into spending $200 to $300 to repair the problem and another $200 to $500 for replacement antivirus software. In many cases, it says, when a user attempted to close the ad, another opened up, making the computer browser unusable. The pop-up ads were designed to resemble security alerts from Microsoft or Apple, the complaint says. The operation used online pop-up ads to mislead computer users into thinking that their machines had been infected with malware, instructing them to call a toll-free number to obtain repairs and antivirus software, according to the agencies.