Nabbed: Scareware Gangs Please Meet the FBI’s “Trident Tribunal”

The FBI has been working with several other countries have seized servers and bank accounts which netted two scareware gang criminals $74 million. The scareware involved is the MacDefender

and its Windows cousin which installed by visiting a phony site and requesting a free scan. This “scan” (better spelled “scam”) would then report phony viruses being on the computer which for a fee ($129 via your credit card numbers) would be “removed”.

This scam involved approximately one million victims. A second gang lured people by placing legitimate looking ads which fed malicious code on legitimate sites using codes for discounts (to hotels) which when triggered by clicking on the ad, installed the scareware malware on the victim’s computer. They profited $2 million that way.

The BBC reported on this early yesterday morning EST), and news at this point from Europe is that two people only have been arrested so far. Apparently both gangs were Latvian, and were using the “Conficker” worm which infected more that 3 million computers in 2008. This worm was so bad that MS offered a $250,000 reward for info leading to the arrest and conviction of the person/s who wrote the virus/Trojan.

This is good news because even if it’s only a small dent in these criminal operations, it’s still a dent.

Source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/scareware-raid/