Executive Action

A couple of weeks ago BritInCalifornia was passing through, and apart from the excellent activities he mentioned on his blog post, we also, for old times sake, got geeky and assisted a friend who had fallen foul of one of the more pernicious and possibly immoral scams on the Internet.

This friend had found a website which offered subscribers the chance to watch DVD’s for £29.99 a month. He got as far as agreeing to the terms and conditions before getting cold feet and backing out. A couple of weeks later an Icon appeared on his computer and a pop-up kept repeatedly appearing, warning that he owed the company £29.99 and that he should give them his credit card details.

Uninstall doesn’t work, and, surprisingly, Norton, Spybot S&D and other anti-malware programs don’t recognise it as a problem. A quick google however revealed that many other people had experienced the same problem, and a website which offered information on removing this programme had been issued with a takedown order. This website provided most of the information on removing it, but we still had to improvise. Firstly we killed the processes running in memory from Task manager and we also found DLL files related to pm_proc and were unable to delete them, until we renamed them first.

The activities of this company come very close to demanding money with menaces, and they are under investigation by the Office Of fair Trading in the United Kingdom. If anyone else has problems, use the links in this post to get rid of the thing, then contact their local trading standards office.