| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Viruses and Scams
by John Toth
“A while back, I clicked on the wrong place of a pop-up that warned me that I had lots of viruses on my laptop. I meant to click on the exit button, but accidentally clicked on scan. That was a big mistake. It was a virus, and it took over the laptop. The virus prompted me to pay $80 to remove it. But, someone I know had done that before – and nothing happened – except that she lost $80. I used another computer to go online and started searching for solutions, and in a couple of hours I had my computer back. I found a program that killed it out. Another solution would have been to erase the entire hard drive and reinstall everything, which takes a long time. I’ve done it a few times, and it’s no fun.
I wonder what type of a person would dream up a program that harms computers? I’m not even talking about the scams like this, but just viruses that do nothing but destroy a hard drive. What is the motive of the creators? Yahoo seems to be more prone than Google. It has a lot of scams and viruses pop up in its email. Each day, either I win the Irish Lottery, or someone in Nigeria wants to give me millions of dollars – if I just send them a few thousand of mine. And, there are the inheritance scams. If I send them some money, I can get a cut. I can’t believe that anyone would fall for something like that.
Unfortunately, Janella Spears of Sweet Home, Ore. did. She let go of $400,000 when someone from Nigeria promised to give her a $26.6 million inheritance. She is not alone. According to a study conducted by the Dutch investigation firm Ultrascan, victims lost $9.3 billion in 2009 and $6.3 billion in 2008. Those are the latest numbers I could find.
If it looks too good to be true, then it is, but why does my Yahoo account want to expire all of the time? I’ve been getting a email stating that if I don’t click on a link that has nothing to do with Yahoo, my e-mail account will be deleted.
All the scammers want is personal information, and then the account will remain — but your identity, and probably also your bank accounts, will be gone. These are ways to rip people off, but back to the earlier question: Why would anyone create a virus just to destroy computers?
Simon Vallor, 22, who lives in Wales, explained after being caught that he created a highly destructive computer virus because he felt sorry for himself. It takes a sick puppy to think that way, but there are a lot of sick puppies out there. Vallor may have been surfing the Internet and happened on a site that actually goes through the steps of how to create a virus. There are even programs just for virus creation. I found them with Google search. It took about 10 seconds. Now you don’t have to be a deranged genius to come up with these things, just deranged.
Wait, what’s this? I can get a piece of the 2012 BP Fund Release? Click on the 1 kilobite doc. file for details? This looks legit. Let me see. I’ll be back in a sec…”
2012-10-20 02:43:25
Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2012/10/viruses-and-scams.html
Source:
