A suspected scammer who used scareware to trick hundreds of thousands of victims around the world into handing over their money has been arrested by Spanish police.
The anonymous Ukrainian was arrested at Barcelona’s El Prat airport after more than a decade of evading arrest, according to Poliscia Nacional. They were apparently backed by the FBI and Interpol, who had issued a red notice for the arrest of this person.
Scareware details: ChronoPay co-founder arrested by Russian authorities.
The alleged attacker is accused of running a global scareware campaign between 2006 and 2011. The victim’s machine was infected with malware and they were forced to display a pop-up asking them to pay compensation as their PC was infected with a virus. Please remove it with antivirus software.
However, the $129 paid for the fake software apparently went straight into the suspect’s pocket.
Victims claim to have lost $70 million over five years.
Scareware was a persistent threat to PC users during this period, controlled by a small number of threat groups. In 2011, Information security reported how investigators from 12 countries worked together to take down two criminal gangs that caused more than $72 million in losses to more than 900,000 people.
At the time, the three largest threats by volume were scareware variants System Fix, Cloud AV 2012, and Win 7 Security 2012.
These can be considered primitive, early forms of ransomware, as their machines were completely locked until victims paid for the fake antivirus. According to ransomware, many of the gangs behind the threat are based in Russia, making it largely untouchable by international police.
This is the latest police coup by the Spanish authorities. In May, local police arrested 40 members of a criminal gang believed to be behind a massive SMS phishing campaign that cost victims €700,000 ($767,000).
