Judge halts company’s anti-spyware claims

A U.S. District Court in Texas has barred a company from making deceptive claims about its anti-spyware program. The Federal Trade Commission alleges the company used bogus scans and illegal spam to market an anti-spyware program that didn’t work as claimed. The judge also froze the assets of Trustsoft Inc. and its principal, Danilo Ladendorf. The FTC also is seeking redress for consumers.

In its suit against Trustsoft, the FTC says the company sent pop-up and e-mail messages informing consumers that their computers had been remotely scanned and that spyware had been detected. However, no such scans were performed.

Trustsoft’s marketing materials also urged consumers to access the SpyKiller web site to get free scan software. The scan deceptively identified anti-virus programs, word processing programs and other processes running on the system as spyware, the FTC alleges. And while the company promised in marketing materials that SpyKiller would find and remove all spyware, the software failed to remove significant amounts of spyware, the FTC says.

In addition, while the scan was free, consumers had to pay about $39.95 to enable SpyKiller’s “removal capabilities, according to the suit.

The FTC also alleges that spam messages promoting the SpyKiller spyware contained deceptive claims, failed to identify themselves as advertising, used false ‘from’ lines, gave no valid postal addresses, and failed to provide consumers with notice of and the ability to opt-out, in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.