An Internet scam artist has been ordered to pay almost $1.9 million back to victims and stop a scheme that used thousands of misspelled Web addresses to trick Internet users into seeing adult advertisements, federal regulators said.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued John Zuccarini of Andalusia, Penn. last year to stop it. Zuccarini set up sites that contained misspellings of popular names like the Backstreet Boys, Victoria’s Secret, Bank of America and The Wall Street Journal.

Visitors who inadvertently misspelled a site’s name went to Zuccarini’s site and were barraged with a hailstorm of pop-up ads for Internet gambling and pornography.

FTC investigators said Zuccarini makes from $800,000 to $1 million per year by charging advertisers whose ads appear on the browser windows.