Chicago, IL – At the Kiev offices of Innovative Marketing Ukraine, hundreds of programmers, translators and database engineers created a software product that made the company a world leader — an exceptional achievement in the impoverished former Soviet republic. But the way the company made its multimillion-dollar profits is nothing to celebrate, according to the criminal charges its owners now face in a district court in Chicago.
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Innovative Marketing, say investigators and Internet-security researchers, was one of the biggest and cleverest propagators of “scareware” — programs that run fake scans on computers of unsuspecting users and then claim to find viruses that can only be removed by downloading some software. Except the viruses don’t exist and the software — which can cost between $30 and $70 — is either useless or can infect the computer itself.
Read the full story at Time Magazine