According to prosecutors, Innovative Marketing set up fictitious advertising agencies that would buy online inventory from media companies, pretending to represent legitimate companies. They then pushed out ads with hidden computer code that generated scary-looking pop-up messages, designed to look like operating system errors or antivirus scans.

The end result was always the same. To get rid of the pop-up warnings, users would have to buy Innovative Marketing's worthless software, prosecutors allege.

Byte Hosting's call centers were then used to "deflect complaints from victims who purchased Innovative Marketing software products," the Department of Justice (DoJ) said.

The scheme convinced victims in more than 60 countries to buy more than 1 million bogus programs, the DoJ said.