Late-night TV is a security threat, too

My pal Bob McMillan at the IDG news service wrote a story about how Ascentive, best known for its FinallyFast.com Web site, will pay $78,000 in penalties and offer $17.90 refunds to thousands of its Washington State customers who purchased the company’s PC cleanup products but didn’t use them.

Here’s a late-night TV commercial that was used to rope people in:

Bob wrote:

The company whose late-night commercials promised to “make your computer run fast the way it’s supposed to,” will pay tens of thousands of dollars in fines and refunds to settle charges that it engaged in deceptive advertising.

In a settlement with the Washington State attorney general’s office, Ascentive, best known for its FinallyFast.com Web site, will pay $78,000 in penalties and offer $17.90 refunds to thousands of its Washington State customers who purchased the company’s PC cleanup products but did not use them.

At FinallyFast.com, PC users download software that tests their system for any performance bottlenecks and then offers to clean things up — for a fee. Consumers complained that the software didn’t work as advertised and that Ascentive racked up charges without properly notifying customers.

According to Assistant Attorney General Jake Bernstein, the company was peddling scareware — software that always found severe problems no matter what the condition of the computer being scanned. “They basically crossed the line in terms of advertising to consumers,” he said.

We’ve written a lot about social engineering on this site. If there’s one lesson here, it’s that late-night TV taught the bad guys well.

Middle-of-the-night infomercials have always preyed on people just tired and desperate enough to believe in the miracle drug or, in this case, software that would make their lives softer and help them sleep better.

A lot of spyware pushers on the Internet use the same tactics.

In the end, the user ought to know better. If the commercial promises you a faster computer with some tried and untrue software, you should expect straightaway that you’re being lied to.

But we are human, and we all fall for someone’s trick once in awhile. I know I have.

I’m just happy to see that in this case, the spyware pusher is being made to pay.

–Bill Brenner