Tell your story of how you almost got scammed or one of your friends/family/coworker

[masteraa]

Post your story here about how you or a person you know almost got scammed on the web or in real life. and or this can be virus/spy ware related. Most people on these forums know better for the common yada yada you see about every 20 clicks on the web. But scammers are getting smarter, and making it so the new or unexperianced user will fall into thier hands.

My story:

So it starts off my grandma calls me... and says "My computer has a window open saying it has a virus, it detected 3 viruses, and its a pop up from Norton."

I was busy currently in real life trying to get somewhere I was late to. I said well if its from Norton then go ahead and click remove. I immediately assumed ah she opened some email attachment and she actually got a virus, and Norton stopped it.

She clicked remove and a new popup said, running this software could prtentually harm your computer do you want to run this software?

then it hit me, it was a fake norton, it was a popup but imitated a norton popup.

I told her to leave it open, I wanted to look at it. Most of the time my grandma is smart, thats why she called me she knows better, but when I had a look at this popup it was pretty darn real.

Makes me mad how scammers take advantage of people, they think there removing a virus and they infact are installing them.

[Smith6612]

Oh, you mean like the Windows Malware that's been plaguing computers lately called Anti-Virus XP 2008? That's one of the worst malware infections I've been cleaning out of people's computers lately who have outdated McAfee or horrible anti-virus software, and it embeds itself so deep into the operating system that it takes me hours to remove it by hand, where it should normally take me a few minutes. Like recently this past week I've made roughly $250 just removing that virus from computers that people have around the area as well as other junk, and installing Avast! Anti-Virus and Spybot: Search and Destroy to their computer. All of the computers I had either had no spyware software on, no anti-virus software on, or the software all out of date or past subscription (OEM installs of McAfee and Norton anyone? :D).

Otherwise, that piece of software pretty much tries to scam you by creating false positives. Thankfully the people who wanted me to remove the software called me up and let me know, or they'd be paying for junk.

[Smith6612]

Umm... is that Chinese or Japanese? All posts here should be in English or Spanish, and it looks like there are bad links in that post as well.

[Livewire]

Well, he did find the right topic - I'm gunna tap report, every post of his has some link mixed in with the foreign language, and I have no idea what the links have to do with anything - I'm certainly not clicking them to find out.


Edit: There, now that that's done, I can't count the number of times I've seen computers infected with some weeeeeeird malware.

Replaces the Windows Security shield (the one with those red, green, yellow, and blue sections) with a blank blue one.

[Wizet]

I hate those spyware programs especially AntiSpyware XP 2008 it annoyed too much and it took me like 3 days to find a solution!.