The Commission announced this week that it had obtained a temporary restraining order against Innovative Marketing Inc and Bytehosting Internet Services. In its complaint against the two companies, it said that they purchased online advertising purporting to be for legitimate companies, but subsequently inserted code to redirect web surfers to their own web pages. Their web sites allegedly offered to scan the computers of unwitting visitors, before falsely claiming to have found problems. The sites would then offer their software to 'clean; victims' machines, alleged the FTC.

The complaint also targeted several individuals: Daniel Sundin, Sam Jain, Marc D'Souza, Kristy Ross, and James Reno.

The injunction, obtained in a Maryland court on Dec 2, prevents the companies from falsely representing that they have conducted any type of computer analysis or detected problems on a person's computer.