Washington state pursues 'scareware' distributors

The Washington state attorney general's office has sued a Texas man for sending "scareware" and is asking the court to require him to stop his activities and pay restitution to people who fell for his alleged scam.

The lawsuit charges James McCreary with sending pop-ups that look like system warnings, telling recipients that their computers have critical errors and offering them a software download that can fix the problems. Victims paid US$40 to download the RegistryCleanerXP software to correct the errors.
However, consumers didn't necessarily have problems with their computers, and the software didn't do anything for them.

The scam "primarily" affected people who hadn't downloaded Windows XP's SP2 update, said Richard Boskovich, senior attorney at Microsoft's Internet safety enforcement team, at a news conference on Monday.

That's because before SP2, Windows XP had the Windows Messenger Service feature, a tool typically used by network administrators to send messages to computer users. McCreary used the Net Send feature of Windows Messenger Service, which is different from Microsoft's instant messenger program, to deliver the pop-ups to end-users. SP2 removed the Windows Messenger Service feature from Windows XP for consumers. "It didn't make sense to have that for people at home because they didn't have a network administrator," Boskovich said. Microsoft worked with the attorney general's office to help pursue the case.

While the software that consumers downloaded didn't do anything detrimental to their computers, Microsoft said it was concerned about the possibility of McCreary abusing information collected from victims who bought the software, such as their credit card information. "In the best-case scenario, they're out $40," Boskovich said about the effect of the scam on people.

Some victims may have decided to buy the software just to stop the system messages from appearing on their computers. According to the suit, one computer in a lab received 214 warning messages in a 24-hour period from McCreary's company, with some messages appearing as often as one minute apart. A user would have to close each one individually, according to the suit. "Most consumers do not know how to stop the incessant messages and for a period of time in which the messages are being sent, are limited in their ability to effectively use their computers," the suit reads.

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