SPAM SCAM Warning.... AV360

Poststructural Pub
1

There’s a scam going that involves the popping up of an official looking notification window that says basically “AV360 virus identified” or “AV360 virus detected” or some such, and gives you the seeming choices of “yes”, downloading the fix, “no”, not downloading the fix, or “”, closing the pop-up.

DO NOT CLICK ANY OF THOSE!

If you do, you activate the virus, and then, after getting more and more crap about it, finally subscribe to a paid fake anti-virus service that does absolutely nothing except “remove” the “AV360” “virus” that it just planted. It’s just a scam to part you from your money.

INSTEAD, hit Control/Alt/Delete, which will bring up your Task Manager, and you can then close that little bugger without falling into their clutches.

DO NOT CLICK any buttons, anywhere that offer to update your anti-virus or to scan your computer for viruses. Get and maintain a reliable anti-virus software agent (I use AVG, which the above scam seems to be pretending to be) and keep it updated through that system.

2

Thanks for the notification. Haven’t seen that one come up yet but I’ll keep an eye out for it.

The absolute worst computer virus of all time by the was Windows ME. Vista is a close second.

3

And I had/have them both.

With regard to the original scam alert, my wife called me into where she was sitting with her laptop last night. She had a suspicious screen showing all sorts of viruses and other similar problems. She was trying to download the software to “fix” the problem. Luckily, I got there in time to avoid disaster. Naturally, this type of scam captures your computer so that you can’t back out. It keeps going around in circles trying to force you to do something that you don’t want to do. I finally turned off the computer. When I turned on the computer again, Norton antivirus had corrected the problem.