New Kaspersky research shows that more and more people are falling for system cleaner hoaxes, which refers to computer programs that claim improve the speed and performance of your computer by fixing issues and/or removing malware, but that actually don’t perform this service at all. In the first half of 2019, close to 1,5 million people installed fake system cleaner software, almost twice as many as in the first half of 2018 when the number of installations approached 750,000.
While many victims of system cleaner hoaxes pay money for useless but otherwise benign software, some not only lose money, but also end up with powerful malware on their machines.