The numbers do seem a bit "pulled out a hat, like a rabit " but iIknow from experiance that lots of people end up with ransomware on their pc's and just pay up. Most times I get to them before they pay.

If they do pay via CC then a charge back is often sucssesful. On eof the biggest problems is people using XP logged in as a local admin, I always make sure people home main account is non admin. Then you know if they want to install a application they have to use the special admin account.

Mines the one with autoruns/process explorer/spybot in the pocket.

How can they try to discourage people from making these purchases in a time when the economy is failing and needs more liquidity? Every one of these purchases feeds back into the global economy somewhere... think of the children!!! More and more will starve if we don't stimulate the economy somehow, why not buy some fake security software? When you think about it, is it really much worse than "real" security software? Next thing they'll be saying to stop paying your taxes because our governments are providing fake security measures!

97.2% of all statistics are made up on the spot. 73.8% of people know that,

It's curious that they could stop what they called a Russian mafia from getting paid with credit cards, leaving people only with stupid coupon systems that were next to impossible to buy - which led to the ultimate shutdown of AllOfMp3. However, they cannot stop this real mafia from getting 15m a month? I mean, VISA and MC must know they are processing transactions for these scammers right?

Ah, I get it, the real antivirus lobby is nowhere near as powerful as the RIAA & Co.....

As long as they go with the industry standard boilerplate license, aren't these scammers doing something perfectly legal? I'd love to see someone legally take these crooks down. It'd scupper a good 20 years of it precedent, errr... all the normal vendor shonky practices.

I bought some security software back in 2005, and when I bought a new machine 18 months later went with the security suite bundled with that. About 3 months ago, I was looking at my online bank statment and noticed a 35 pound charge was taken out for the annual antivirus subscription for the original program! Alright, I should have been more vigilent when I bought it in the first place, but, like gyms, how many dormant subscribers are just handing over cash for nothing at all? These companies must be laughing.

If they where selling extended warranty then where would the problem be?

I saw the title and assumed this was going to be an article about Symantec.

We could just ask to see the scammers' tax returns, surely?

BTW, the Euro's not doing that well! €10m is about $13.5m at the moment...

onto stories like this. One may have to wonder if it is only non tech savvy people being scammed.

Look down. Advert for antivirus-pro-2008

Good work there register.

Paris, cos even she can't be that dumb.

What's wrong with those? I've just tried it and got the same answer as my calculator.

Mine's the one with numbers scribbled on the sleeve.