Haha, NO! Stupid scammers.

Post Reply New Topic

This is a good illustration of why you should change the base theme(if only the colors) of your windows operating system.

Or just use Linux like I do.
[img][650:800]http://i12.photobucket.com/albums/a213/ThreeFingerPete/Haha-NO-1.png[/img]

What you see here is a mocked up and trumped-up virus threat. That blue box is supposed to look like a warning from my operating system. Of course I don't use that blue, and I don't use windows at all. The warning window is fake: it's just part of the browser window and not a separate object at all. They want you to click it.. anywhere. Even the "x" to close isn't safe.

I certainly don't have those viruses that they list in their fake scan. They don't exist or work in Linux. It is an outright lie... my hard drive organization looks nothing like that.

The idea is that they will trick you. Once you click that you start the process of installing something that really is nasty. Suddenly your clean install is infected.

So take my advice. If you are using windows, at the very least, find out how to change the color scheme, so that when you see a pop up like that, its immediately obvious that it's a scam.

Mods, can you leave this here? I want less tech-saavy people to see it. The ones that might never wander into Computers, Math, Science, and Technology

Last edited by Fuzzy on 11 Mar 2010, 7:11 am, edited 2 times in total.

I have gotten that a few times but I use firefox. I have always clicked out of it because my husband told me don't ever use other scanners that pop up because it could be a virus. Only use our own scanner.

Yep. I use Mac OSX and Win7 so I was not fooled by this scam either time. Also, there's already a discussion in the WrongPlanet.net forum.

I remember reading about this on another forum (non AS related). Someone was shocked about seeing a Windows prompt on their Ubuntu set-up.

Its not a prompt. Its just a graphic that looks like a prompt. If you hover your mouse over the border, you will not get the resize cursor indicating that it is an object separate from the browser tab. Its a hotlink that looks like a windows system message.

And the scan is faked too.

Right, it's not a scanner either. It's just an animated graphic that looks like a scanner.

I don't think any browser should allow 'pop-up' windows under any circumstances, they should completely null out that function.

I've seen a few of those in my time. One way out is to shut it down using the Task Manager (if you're using Windows). What I don't get is, why do they have to get you to click something before they can infect you? If they've got so far as to get that hidden link onto your desktop, why can't they just infect you anyway?

My saving grace is that I've always been paranoid about messing up my computer in any way whatsoever - so as soon as I heard about complete system backup programs, I got one. First sign of any monkey business, and I simply revert to the last decent backup that I made. As the program completely overwrites the drive, any worms, viruses etc., are zapped. I don't mean the Windows backup-and-restore thing, that doesn't do a thorough job at all. MaxBlast does the trick as long as you've got a Maxtor or Seagate drive, and it's free. Though if you go that way, it's important to keep your data files on a separate drive or partition, or you'll lose those as well. And it doesn't hurt to scan that drive for nasties occasionally, because it's not unheard of for a virus to jump from the system drive to the data drive, via Word or some similar overcomplicated piece of junk. But most data files can't be easily infected.

You have to click on it because it's not on your desktop. It's an animated graphic that looks like a virus scanner in a webpage. If an actual program were installed on your computer, they would basically be home free.

I bet they could even get a lot of users to input administrator credentials so Windows Security can do its thing, not realizing that they just gave some malicious cracker full access to their machine.

Did Dent ever manage to install that trojan or whatever that wanted to run in WINE?

Because they are just showing a webpage. The page in itself isn't a threat, it is just a picture saying you have got problems. A graphical lie. So, assuming your computer is Windows, there is no actual threat to your computer at that stage. However, after you click "anywhere" it is likely that the site will try to install something on your computer. That will likely initiate the real Windows security pop up box asking you if you want to install "whatever" - however, the scammers hope is that you will just click 'OK' or and let the malware onto your computer having been fooled by the fake virus warning.

I tried explaining this in another thread about a month ago, but apparently rolled off looking like an idiot. My sister who works at a college that realisticaly gets every computer virus to date, practicaly, says it's a stupid set up to. Some people do fall for it, but already plenty of others have caught on by now.

What makes me angry is that this stuff if forced onto the user occasionaly. I would like to just re-visit my prefered erotica web sights and wrong planet in peace. Not get that in my face.

Thank you for posting something better than me. I'm failure at web page screenshots.

I also see at least two glaring grammatical errors - those alone would tell me this is not legitimate. I would have thought the scammers were smart enough to at least check the quality of the English, but apparently not.

So, basically even if you click the X to close the box, it still screws you over... so zetta slow! No wonder my last computer started screwing up! Zetta sons of digits [censored due to large quantity of mathematical profanity].

Well, at least I know what the deal is now. This scam is garbage! CRUNCH! I'll add it to the heap!

I've heard it said that minor errors are introduced deliberately. From the scammers point of view, a victim overlooking such things adds to the scammers sense of superiority.

Aw. You mods moved it.

So now all those of us that already know better can read something we already know, and those at WP likely to fall for such duplicity will not be exposed to a good message.

This discourages me from contributing positively to the WP community.

That's a good point. The technology forum is kind of deserted. I think it's perfectly valid in, say, the News forum. Where did you put it originally?


Well, they probably just din't realize your intention. But then without leaving a note of why and who moved it, it seems like he/she doesn't even think he/she could be wrong.