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Sheriff's Office warns of "FBI" Web scam

Submitted by Howard Owens on December 19, 2012 - 7:40pm

The Genesee County Sheriff's Office is warning about a computer scam that has apparently hit at least one person locally and prompted a call to law enforcement.

The scam apparently involves a computer virus or Trojan horse of some type that locks up a user's computer while surfing a questionable site on the Web.

A red screen flashes and a verbal message activates informing the user that the FBI has frozen the user's computer due to some supposed violation and demands $300 be paid to the "FBI" via "money pac" before the computer will be unfrozen.

"This appears to be some sort of scam/virus that would probably require a professional to fix as the FBI doesn't not conduct investigations this way," said Deputy Chief Gordon Dibble.

There is information about the scam and how to deal with it that can be found in a Google search.

Dibble questioned whether some of solutions found online might also be a scam and suggested that inexperienced, or non-expert users contact a computer professional for assistance if they suspect such a problem.

Users should have good virus protection installed, Dibble noted, and said users should be careful about their Web travel.

My take: I get a lot of e-mails from people around the community who have added me to their address book with what to me are dangerous attachments or bogus links. This means that people who downloaded such an attachment or opened such a link got their computer infected.

Unless you're on guard against such malware, and especially if you use Windows, it's pretty much inevitiable you will get some sort of virus on your machine.

The best computer security is: never open attachments or click on links that you're not sure about. I never open attachments of any kind that are part of a chain e-mail (forwarded from one person to another) or click on links that look like they will take me to a Web site I'm not confident is legitimate.

If you're not sure of an e-mail communication ... even from your mother ... don't open it, don't download the attachment, don't click the link. If necessary, call and verify that the person meant to send that e-mail to you.

crime

December 19, 2012 - 8:36pm

Mark Brudz

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Joined: Feb 9 2012

Howard, While you are correct about the e-mail precautions, this particular FBI scam has many variants and is what is known as a 'Drive by Virus' that can be placed by hackers on many sites.

I know this because I have had to deal with it for clients who got blocked by google because the their site was spreading the trojan and my father of all people has received it twice, (The only one emailing him is me and Walmart.)

There are many variants of this virus, what is most important is keeping your anti -virus and anti- malware sotware up to date, CPR does a really great job of clearing the more pesky infestations.

The FBI scam is NOT normally spread by email attachments, it comes from infected websites, sadly usually the more popular ones.

December 19, 2012 - 11:05pm

John Stone

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Joined: Jul 4 2008

Very good advice, that!
If it's not the drive-by type, likely it will be something that sounds a little too good to be true. Rest assured, it is! Don't EVER send money to someone you didn't initiate contact with, PERIOD. and you should never have to spend any money to "get" money...

Also, If you find that these things are somewhat frequent, or if you really don't want to spend the time and money on anti-virus and anti-malware stuff, You might want to think about getting a small partition of your hard-drive set aside for a Linux/Unix Operating System. There are some respectably user-friendly distributions out there right now, and they can be customized almost infinitely. You can try one, and tinker with it for a while. If you don't like that one, find another. If you can find one you like for on-line activity, you can forget all about that virus stuff. (Though most *nix users set up an antivirus that scans outgoing email for the benefit of Windows and Mac users.) You simply do all the online stuff in Linux, and Windows for the rest.
Once it is set up, if anything ever goes wrong with it, you re-boot and it's back to exactly what it was... (Sometimes I will try to find viruses so that I can see if I can make it open, and see if it will do anything to performance. Short of opening it in a 'Windows emulator' program, no luck, so far...

December 20, 2012 - 3:13pm

Richard Clark

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Joined: Dec 11 2008

Thanks Mark!!!!
Yeah we have seen quite a bit of this and we also seen quite a bit of rootkit viruses. I agree that if you get this virus or any other bug/infection that is asking for personal information that you DO NOT provide any private personal information in any manor. Most of the time these infections are used for identity theft.