Facebook scams are a dime a dozen, but they still tend to entice lots of people to click and share them. Only last week we told you about a scam which offers an alleged $500 Amazon gift certificate, and today we found out about one that offers instant weight loss.

Speedy weight loss is something many people are looking for, and this specific scam is using a very popular diet – the HCG diet. The new scam reads something along the lines of “I’ve lost 10 pounds in just one week all thanks to HCG!” and a link for you to click. There are other versions of it going around, but you get the gist. Whether or not you can actually lose all this weight with HCG is not the point, because the link has nothing at all to do with it.

So what is it about? The usual thing. If you click on the link you will be told to share it with all your friends, add a favorable comment, and will then be promptly redirected to some website that tries to sell you something unrelated or get you to fill a survey. These Facebook scams exist to drive more traffic to the scammer’s websites, preferably while earning some of your money on the way. So please, don’t fall for it. And if you see your friends sharing something similar, do let them know they’re endangering everyone, and get them to remove the post from their wall.

Source: Sophos

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class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/intro1.jpg" alt="" />You’ve probably heard the term “don’t scam a scammer” but I’ve always been fond of “don’t scam a tech writer” myself. I’m not saying we’re infallible, but if your scam involves the Internet, a href="../service/windows">Windows PC and a cold calling technician, it won’t take long for the penny to drop.

I’m basing this article on my experience with a would-be scammer who called my parents house last week. This isn’t the first time Mr Windows Repair Guy has so helpfully graced us with his detailed instructions, and this time I was determined to find out exactly what the deal was.

Tell your friends, tell your relatives – Microsoft does not call to fix your PC.

The Call

When the phone rang, the guy on the other end claimed to be from “Windows Technical Support”. Many people would probably notice that something is awry at this point, as Microsoft isn’t known for cold calling to tell you there’s a problem with your computer. Straight away I knew it was the good old “you’ve got viruses, and we can fix ‘em” scam, so instead of the “where’s the Start button on my Linux desktop?” routine I had fun with last time, I thought I’d play along.

I was informed that Microsoft had detected that I had viruses on my computer, and that if I didn’t follow his advice to remove them, my computer could “crash unexpectedly at any time” (tell me something I don’t know).

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So I sat down at my parents’ new Windows 7 machine and asked him what sort of viruses I had. He told me to click on Start, right-click on Computer and choose Manage. Then I was told to click Event Viewer, Custom Views then Administrative Events.

This is where the scam gets somewhat believable. This screen displays a log of messages from various services and programs running on your PC. At first glance, there are a lot of red crosses and warning triangles, which could probably look quite serious to an average user.

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Apparently, these were my viruses!

The Fix

I was then asked if I could delete any of these new-found viruses with a simple right-click and Delete. As we all know by now – these aren’t viruses. Additionally, you can’t remove the log with the right-click context menu, so I guess they’re just here to stay?

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Of course the fix was only round the corner. Once I’d informed my new best friend that I couldn’t remove them, he told me to open Internet Explorer (!) and assured me there was software available to help victims like me.

The website I was told to visit was AMMYY.com (which we are not linking to), but the software didn’t seem to match up. This website claims to provide a remote desktop solution, not the malware dressed up as security software I was expecting.

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At this point I had been on the phone for a good 15 minutes, with much of the conversation lost in translation as I struggled to understand the heavy Indian accent. I had words, informed him that I knew exactly what was going on and would be reporting the incident to BT (the telephone provider) as well as shaming him in any way possible and bid him adieu.

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Didn’t stop him calling back immediately though did it?

The Cost

There are a plethora of reasons you shouldn’t trust a cold caller, but even more so when it comes to your PC, your personal information and suspicious software. The costs associated with someone gaining remote access to your computer could be devastating. Sensitive information relating to bank accounts, passwords for paid services and documents that could be used to href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/9-ways-prevent-identity-theft-computer-hackers-2/">forge an identity could be stolen.

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Goods could be ordered via services that save your billing information and any sites that remember logins will be easily accessible. In addition to theft, safeguards like anti-virus programs might be disabled and further malicious software like keyloggers and trojans could be installed.

There is unfortunately very little that can be done to combat these scams. I phoned BT and was told that the numbers from this type of call are virtually untraceable, but calls came from “somewhere in Asia” and were a persistent problem. If the perpetrators are using href="../tags/voip">VoIP services like Skype, the calls are not easy to trace, and it’s not impossible to use a ringback service to href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/top-8-online-tools-to-identify-the-owner-of-a-phone-number/">decipher the number.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article has provided some brief insight into this kind of scam, which is prevalent all over the world. Unless you fancy becoming part of the big bad botnet, you’d better never trust a caller like this. Variations are common – sometimes it’s bogus anti-virus software that requires payment, or similar – so remain vigilant.

I’m not sure whether AMMYY.com are a legitimate company or not, but Panda’s Firefox plugin doesn’t rate the website and nor does a quick Google search which brings up all sorts of “scam” notices. I’m going to recommend that nobody uses an AMMYY.com product, purely on the basis that there are href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/7-easy-screen-sharing-and-remote-access-tools-all-free/">lots of quality proven alternatives that aren’t linked to dishonest individuals who want your money, data and bandwidth.

Have you had any phone calls like this? Do you know anyone who has? Consider sharing this article, and spreading the word. Comments and discussion are welcome below this article.

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Hold on your horses when deciding to buy a registry software. I know the importance of registry software in keeping your computer running more efficiently by removing unnecessary registry entries, compress and defragmenting them, wiping cache and other junk files, and finally even helping you to eliminate unnecessary startup entries. But don’t stumble into an even gloomier and deeper hole than you currently are. I mean, of course what drives you through this whole process of registry software searching and research very possibly is because you have some troubles with your system. From only trying to figure out why your system are running so slow, resolving those error dialog boxes that pop up frequently, to the blue screen of death. But in searching for a solution, you should also consider that the product you will buy can deliver what it promise and hope it won’t add even more problems to your system.

Nowadays, if you search any keywords in Google that is related to registry software, say “registry software reviews” or “registry error repairer”, you will find an astonishing record of results. Most of them are related to a group of registry software that is referred by thousands of websites, blogs, social sites, and Ezines. You might think that these software should be great or at least they cannot be that bad because there is no way thousands of reviewers are wrong. This is where everything can be quite tricky. Unfortunately what seems to look like natural software users are merely just affiliates. And most of the time, how loyal an affiliate to one certain software depends on how much commission they get, not how good the software really is. Thus, you can be certain that there will be promotion frenzy when the publisher gives affiliates a commission up to 80% every sale the affiliates are generating no matter how crap the product is. When this happen, you might not want to be the one who are trapped in the middle of that demonic transaction. But don’t get me wrong, the affiliate industry itself is not the culprit here. There are many software publishers with proven track records and great products offer high commission to their affiliate. And even I myself every now and then eagerly promote several products that I consider as great. But as consumers, you should be equipped with at least a general knowledge in every purchasing decision.

Basically, internet is just a kind of market where many sellers and merchants are gathered and offer you the products they sell. The trick when deciding to purchase a registry software, or software in general, is that you can’t tell good from bad until you make a purchase. But don’t worry, there are several ways to guide you and help you decide if the registry software you are going to buy offers genuine services and great solution to your PC maintenance and repairing purpose or just offers utterly empty promises. Several things to look out when choosing a good registry software and avoid scam are reliable contact information including real office building located in the country where you can access easily, long and proven track record of the company, safe operation and a solid backup function of the software, moderate number of errors founding, and finally a relatively small number of complaint. All of this information can be acquired easily by visiting the official website of the publisher and their product information. For complaint report you can refer to reliable online complaint forums like ComplaintsBoard.com.

All of these things are related to technical inquiry regarding the registry software you want to buy. Although these factors alone can effectively help you to find the legitimate registry software, the one that will truly offer you solution instead of adding more troubles, there is one thing you can add to your research list that will finalize and close the deal of your decision. This last thing you should do is testing the software for yourself. But don’t just try anything they throw at you. You just only need to try the registry software that offer time-limited trial version not function-limited trial version. Believe it or not, these two types of trial version offer a very different layer of “game play” especially in the registry software field. Why it is important to try the package that offer you a time-limited trial version is because you can conduct a fully repairing and optimization operation when scanning your disk and entire system. This is vital because it is when repairing and optimization operation does a registry software really show what it is capable of. Forget about how many errors every publisher promised can be found by their registry software, forget about how fast your PC will going to be after you use and buy their software, and forget about how safe their software’s optimization process really is. A good, no I mean a great software can shows its greatness whether it is in free trial version or in purchased full version. This is also what I want you to notice. A good registry software publisher is the one that should build a bridge to their customers using the products they promote. And this bridge should be built for a long term relationship. A free trial but fully functional version of their registry software is the kind of product that can perfectly build such a bridge. It can show us as a customer, a user, and a prospective buyer, how great their software really is. And they value our knowledge by believing that it’s no use to throw us a free trial version with astonishing scanning record but exist only to impress us at first but then failed to meet all of its promises after we buy. This is the publisher who believes that in order to gain a quality relationship with their prospective buyers there is no other way to gain it other than by trust. This is true because they intend to stay in the industry for a long time. But this of course cannot be said for software publishers that desert you right after you bought the software.

Among the small number of registry software publishers that offer their trial version software with fully functional features, TuneUp is one of them. With TuneUp Utilities 2009, their all-in one Windows utilities suite, TuneUp marked the milestone in being one of the longest companies that stays in this industry of more than 10 years and still delivers solid product lineup. TuneUp Utilities 2009 itself is a utility suite that combines both effectiveness and simplicity.  Everything you need on PC optimization and Windows maintenance are included in the package. Just check its capabilities and you will experience the full scope of their business expertise without need to buy it immediately. This way, you can comfortably make a purchase decision believing that you can trust your money in a good publisher’s hand. Don’t bother even trying software like Miracle Technology Perfect Optimizer or RegCure. This kind of software only offer you free scanning but not repairing.

Chander65′s video is not well known, at the moment (October 15th 2009) he only has 1359 views. But I truly beleive that this can be a big huge problem! Chander65′s Description: This is a simple program i got a couple of months back so im deciding to show it off! yup 84200 points , if alot of people start using this im going to start changing through paypal but for now its free! heres the download: IM only giving it to you if u Pm me you email and accept a lockerz invite “xbox live should be free” Now notice that he doesn’t give the link until you sign up and accept his Locherz invite. Let me explain what Lockerz is. Lockerz is a site where you can get free items such as gym stuff, tv, xbox 360, you name it! The point into getting these prizes is to have alot of points. But there are two ways to get points. The first way is to play their games every day, with the exeption of only playing them once! The second way is to invite people to join! That is where you come in. I did this with a seperate account just incase of scams and hacks! i tried it and I joined. Now I told Chander65 that I signed up! He said I’ll give you the code right now! What happens!? Nothing!!! I send him a message saying where was my code! He did not repond! After that I send him another note with another account saying if he was legit or not! He answered which clearly states that he was ignoring my other account! Basically he is doing this just to get more points on his Lockerz account to get free …

The “Sexiest Video Ever” scam made the rounds on Facebook during May of 2010. This video shows how the application what happens when you click on the link and how the malicious application is installed to eventually download an adware to your PC. More info on our blog: community.websense.com

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Imagine the scenario:  You’re browsing the internet, and suddenly Windows Security Center pops up and tells you that you’re infected with viruses.  Also, it shows you a huge number of viruses that are supposedly infecting your computer.  It tells you that you should click the window to download an update to your Windows XP 2008 antivirus, which will cost you about fifty dollars.  This is the situation when you’re infected with the fraudware family of viruses that pretend to be part of the Windows XP program.

The fact of the matter is that you’re probably not infected with hundreds of viruses as the program claims.  It’s probably only one or two viruses.  However, it does download a lot of spyware onto your computer.  All of which is geared towards scaring you into giving away your money.

What you get in return for your payment is a temporary restoration of your computer.  It quits locking up and running slowly, but only for a time.  When the viruses become active again, it asks for more money for a different “antivirus” program, which only further bogs down your system.  This process continues until you are just unable to do anything with your computer.  Then, unless you know how to get around a host of active viruses, you may have to rely on a professional computer technician.  This will probably cost you at least two hundred dollars.

The best thing to do when you first see the pop up is to unplug your computer from your network and get a good antivirus program.  Now comes another problem, just what program to get?  You could go online and get a free one, but the problem is that there’s no guarantee that it will get rid of these programs.  The same holds true with many antivirus programs that you can buy, like McAfee or Norton.

The problems with getting just any program are primarily that either XP 2008 goes undetected by them, or it imbeds itself in your system in such a way that they can’t remove it without running your computer in a special diagnostic mode.  Even then, there’s no guarantee, because it can appear even to your computer as a legitimate Windows program.

Now some users might try to search the internet forums for some advice on how to manually remove these viruses.  This is a virtual Pandora’s box of confusion.  The internet forums are full of different methods of manually removing XP Antivirus and the others.  In all likelihood, few if any of these methods will work.  They may very well have worked for the person making the post, but the nature of these fraudware programs is that they imbed themselves in your system in different ways, depending on what version of what virus you have.  Ultimately, the internet forums are an exercise in frustration, and don’t come recommended.

What it all comes down to is that you need an antivirus program to deal with your infection.  This program should be user-friendly and consistently effective.  It wouldn’t hurt also if it remained up to date on its own.  Fortunately, there is such a program out there.  Spyzooka will take care of all of your needs.

This video showcases a series of rogue security software programs that detect a fake threat called “Spyware.Monster”. From the Symantec Security Response blog: www-secure.symantec.com

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