Auto Racing

I pride myself in being somewhat immune to scams. However, I fell for this so very hopelessly...I am sad to admit. I reckon I have been through a lot of stress in the last three or four months, and that is what scammers count on.

Well, one day I was working on my computer, and suddenly I get this message that I had spyware and virus on my computer. I noticed my AVG was not working, so I figure I let the license lapse while I was out of the country, and was somewhat glad I got that notice from the nice folks at Antivirus Pro 2009.

I readily clicked on the removal button, and was prompted to buy the darn thing. In retrospective, the site was very fishy, dare I say, veeeeeeeeeeery phishy! However, afraid I would get major destruction on my hard drive, I signed up for the download, ran a scan, and was a happy camper. There is a sucker in all of us indeed.

I was a bit suspicious, because I did not get an email confirmation of the order, and the receipt that appeared on screen had somebody else's name, rather than mine.

Well, every single day, the same message kept on popping up, saying I had the same 31 spyware items on my hd, prompting me to remove them. Which I did.

After a few days, stress and all, I realized I had been big time scammed, and bingo, it does not take much sleuthing to find out this is a scam. There is no software. All you get is a screen, the silly pop-ups and a US$75.00 charge to your credit card, in my case, from a company called "professional BD Soft! from good ol' Latvia.

I did what I needed to do. Apparently it does not phish anything out of your computer, and at least on my case, all they did charge was the 75 bucks to my card - there was no shopping spree. Plus I removed the silly pop-ups and screen from my computer.

However, you might not be so lucky. They might have different modus operandi for different countries

Thus, if you get a prompt from Antivirus Pro 2009, know it is a scam, not antivirus software. Don't pay attention to the apocalyptic message displayed.

They got me good, but I am done with them yet.