Washington State Sues Fake Spyware Cleaner

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Another lawsuit has been leveled at an anti-spyware company, only this time, it’s not really an anti-spyware company. Secure Computer LLC of White Plains, N.Y has been sued for inducing computer users to download their software, an anti-spyware program that actually made the user’s security even weaker.

The lead defendant in the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court, is Secure Computer LLC of White Plains, N.Y. The company’s president, Paul E. Burke, who lives in the Bronx, and Gary T. Preston, of Jamaica, N.Y., have made more than $100,000 since summer 2004 selling software known as “spyware cleaner” over the Internet — software they advertised using mass, misleading e-mails and pop-ups, the lawsuit said.

Besides Burke and Preston, named in the lawsuit are Burke’s wife, Wendy; Seth T. Traub of Portsmouth, N.H.; Zhijian Chen of Portland, Ore.; and Manoj Kumar of Maharashtra, India. They are accused of sending out e-mails and advertisements on Secure Computer’s behalf in exchange for a 75 percent commission on each $49.95 software sale.

Many of the advertisements purported to be from Microsoft and flashed warnings that spyware or viruses had been discovered on a user’s computer. Source: Yahoo.com

We Say: My son’s computer got hit by one of these fake anti-spyware “companies”, spy axe and spy sheriff, and was a real pain to remove, it would actually flash an ad overtop of the windows update icon in the task bar and popup one of those messages that looked like it came from the operating system saying he had malware, etc. I hope they go after all of these companies, although, if they only made $100,000 since the summer of 2004, they weren’t doing a very good job. It says they could be responsible for millions of dollars in damages. Let’s hope so.

More info here