Fraud... maybe. It might possibly qualify as an attempt to deceive. I think it would be a very weak case and practically impossible to make that argument.

That dynamic reactive 2nd attempt to trick you, which is only invoked if you caught and declined the first, is materially different from the first attempt, and different from if the installer always presented both extras.

The special difference is just that it exposes the intent which was theoretically deniable otherwise, even if everyone "just knows" what's really going on.

If an installer always proposes an extra, or 2, or 13, then the vendor can claim "I'm just offering this extra that I honestly and sincerely believe the user might be interested in and might benefit from".

We "just know" that's bs, but it's possible and it's hard to disprove purely on the face of it.

You could try by pointing out things like how the outer packaging only said that the contents would be Product not Product+OtherProduct, and how the checkbox for the non-advertized and un-expected extra was pre-selected and visually tiny. But that just doesn't quite add up to proof of anything.

But offering one extra, and then only trying again with another if the user declined the first, THAT exposes that the only intent of the extra was to get the user to take it any way they can manage to do it, and not a sincere "offer" of something the user might have actually voluntarily sought otherwise.

It's not that it's 100x more evil. The norm is already bad, and this is just a little more of the same.

It's that it exposes the true intent in a way that can't be denied.

It also invalidates any arguments based on "the user accepted" something. You'd never actually win in court, but in plain conversational argument, if say the crapware caused some damage, the vendor could't claim that the user voluntarily accepted the risk of damage by voluntarily installing the software. But like I said that's just fantasy academic theory. You'd never actually make that stick in court.

I had believed that only a government prosecutor in the United States could "file criminal charges." Do you know how this works?