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FBI Busts International 'Scareware' Rings

The FBI this week announced that it had disrupted two international cyber crime rings peddling "scareware," which targeted victims via pop-ups and fake online ads.

The effort, dubbed Operation Trident Tribunal, targeted scammers who victimized more than one million computer users to the tune of $74 million, the FBI said.

In the first case, the FBI's Seattle office investigated reports of a scam that directed people to a Web site promising a free virus scan. Navigating to the site, however, infected the person's computer with malicious software, and consumers were soon besieged with pop-up ads that said they had been infected with a virus. The only way to get rid of the virus, the pop-ups said, was to buy the antivirus software been advertised, which cost $129.

Ultimately, that scam hit an estimated 960,000 victims, who lost a total of $72 million, the FBI said.

The second case was investigated by the FBI's Minneapolis office, which looked into an international crime ring that utilized an online advertising scheme known as "malvertising."

Two individuals allegedly created a fake advertising agency and submitted an ad for a hotel chain on a Minneapolis newspaper's Web site. After the ad was posted, however, the duo changed the ad's computer code so that people clicking on it were infected with a malicious software program that launched scareware. That resulted in about $2 million in losses for victims.

The FBI said it worked with agencies in almost a dozen countries: Ukraine, Latvia, Germany, Netherlands, Cyprus, France, Lithuania, Romania, Canada, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The malvertising scammers have been arrested abroad and officials have seized more than 40 computers, servers, and bank accounts. The investigation continues, the FBI said.

The agency warned computer users to be on the lookout for security alerts that appear a bit off. "Upon closer inspection, some elements aren't fully functional. For instance, to appear authentic, you may see a list of reputable icons—like software companies or security publications—but you can't click through to go to those actual sites," the FBI said.

The warnings will also include names that appear legitimate, like Virus Shield, Antivirus, or VirusRemover. Real antivirus solutions can help guard against these types of scams.

As security firm Sophos noted, it can be difficult in cases like this to gather evidence given the global nature of the Web. "A crook in Belgium can defraud someone in Australia via a malicious advert served from China which tricks them into a credit card transaction in Canada processed by a server in Finland," analyst Paul Ducklin wrote in a blog post .

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