The world of registry cleaners has taken more than its fair share of bad press and negative media attention because of a number of high profile scandals regarding bogus products which were designed with one specific intention: to willfully trick, mislead and defraud the consumer from their hard earned cash.

Software applications were not merely sloppily designed or lazily executed, nor did they merely fail to perform the duties that they promised they would do. While the creators of these programs were eventually caught and punished for what they’d done, the fallout was caused as a result of the following scandal was pronounced indeed and has made it all the more difficult for legitimate vendors and distributors of registry cleaner applications to be able to ply their trade. The legacy which has been left behind has been an unenviable one with many consumers regarding the typical registry cleaner program as little more than a shrewd plot designed to con them out of their hard earned cash. And how can blame them?

With a number of less than ethical vendors associated with registry cleaner applications relying on grandiose scare mongering tactics about the big bad bogeyman that awaits the consumer who does not pay up for a registry cleaner no wonder consumer confidence is at an all time low. A new word has been coined which succinctly and eloquent sums the dilemma up: “Scareware.”

One of the most infamous of these scareware application packages was the WinFixer program which was especially insidious because it relied on a number of affiliate programs that unbeknown to the web visitor were also involved in the scam. A message would appear on the screen advising the visitor that the website had carried out a registry and virus scan of their computer and had detected that there was a number of Trojan horse applications as well as other malware programs present. In reality, the user would simply be presented with a pre-determined number of viruses and other bugs which were arbitrarily determined and which had no bearing whatsoever on the basis of the contents of the registry of the visitor.

One of the most troubling aspects of the WinFixer registry cleaner scam was that regardless of the actual choice that the user made, they would always find that the program would download itself to their machine anyway. Attempting to manoeuvre away from the page in question, close down the dialogue box offering the services or otherwise move away from the site would all result in the same thing.

Another variation of the WinFixer registry cleaner scam was that a free trial would be offered again, available from a number of seemingly unrelated website in an attempt to minimize the level of suspicion it raised. The free trial would operate in exactly the same manner as any other registry cleaner program in that a scan would be conducted…and viruses would be reported. Just like the method outlined above, any and all results which were returned were shill values and were not reflective of the value inside the registry of the user.

The program would then claim that in order to actually remove the viruses and threats that it had so identified, the user would be required to upgrade the current version of WinFixer they had installed on their computer to a full version for a fixed fee. In order to make the removal of the program even tougher, the WinFixer application would then install dozens of fraudulent and fictitious keys within the host computers registry in order to make it even more difficult for the user to remove the program.

I hope this article has been informative and has given you more of an insight into registry cleaner software. If you would like to learn more about the top 5 registry cleaners available on the net go to: http://top5registrycleaners.net/