‘Terrified’ 60-year-old woman told to pay up for illegally downloading porn
Edit: Just to reinforce the lessons of the article, the demand for payment is legit, although unethical. The woman supposedly had her machine cracked, vector unknown. A file-sharing program was installed without her knowledge and it was sharing copyright material.
It’s the cost of being online. Buy/subscribe to anti-malware/anti-virus programs. Keep your machines up to date, upgrade the machines if the OS goes out of date.
The poor woman gave some internet scammers a couple of hundred bucks for absolutely nothing.Someone should teach her to google “internet scams” and I’m sure this one will come up.
My current favorite for it’s audacity is the E-mail from Canada Revenue telling me CRA has redone my taxes and I have a refund of $458 coming if I’ll just click at the link.
Who doesn’t love “free” money from the government.
My current favorite for it’s audacity is the E-mail from Canada Revenue telling me CRA has redone my taxes and I have a refund of $458 coming if I’ll just click at the link.
Once in a while, I get robocalls from, allegedly, CRA that I owe money and that if I don’t pay up quickly, I’ll be dealing with the police.
I actually called the government about this and I was informed that those calls are bogus. In fact, the CRA actually has a web page discussing those calls.
“the demand for payment is legit”
Err…no it isn’t…it’s fraud for all intents and purposes. Certainly unethical.
It’s unreasonable to expect the average person to keep their computers and routers secure. Case in point: this was known four years ago:
“The most popular home wireless routers are easily hacked and there’s little you can do to stop it, says a new study by research firm Independent Security Evaluators.”
https://www.cnet.com/news/top-wi-fi-routers-easy-to-hack-says-study/
I don’t know of any evidence that this has improved. Does anyone else?
I called their phone number, as they instruct, to avoid “being arrested”.
It was an interesting conversation, as I asked them for their name address and phone number, so I could send the RCMP over the4 to have them arrested for being fraud artists.
In a thick east Induan accent, the scammer told me to hang up or ai would be arrested. HA! These people are as dumb as bricks, looking for people dumber than they are.