The FTC got a preliminary injunction against the perpetrators of the scam in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia based on charges that the practices are fraudulent and unfair to consumers. The FTC is also working with Portuguese authorities. The commission also got Network Solutions Inc., the company that manages the master directory of Internet sites, to withdraw the five Web addresses used in the fraud. The client was losing customers to the scam, which cut into the site's advertising revenue and hurt the client's chances of selling the site to another company. The procedure for doing so varies from browser to browser.
Parents can also use Internet filtering software to block pornographic sites.
Programs that seek out dirty words and block sites on the fly would be likely to block the sites, though the automatic software has often been faulted for blocking many innocuous sites as well. The other major form of Internet filtering relies upon large databases of forbidden sites that can be updated regularly. By John Schwartz.