Scammed

I guess the big news since my post on Recent Doings, apart from the Torah writing, was getting scammed. A pop-up window appeared on March 12 saying that Safari had detected a virus and I should call such-and-such a number to have it dealt with. Clicking "okay" wouldn't make it go away. Similar things had happened before, and I had always had the good sense to quit Safari or shut down the computer. But this time I fell for it and called the number.

The helpful technician said he'd fix it. He'd need to take control of my computer, which I let him do. I agreed to have him do the necessary work and authorized an on line payment of $577 from my checking account for the work and a service contract. After several hours, my computer was working again.

A couple of days later, when my kid brother made his weekly phone call, I told him about it. Later that night he e-mailed me to inform me that it was a scam. He linked a site which had a screen cap showing the sort of pop-up window I had responded to. That site recommended reinstalling my operating system, which proved fairly simple. Since it involved wiping out all my files, the site also recommended backing them all up and after reinstalling the OS going through all and deciding which to copy to the clean computer. That looked like too much work, and besides, I had no idea which ones might have been infected by the scammers. I also realized that with a couple of exceptions I never used the files anyway. So I copied six that I wanted to have, a couple as templates, and a couple that I really wanted to keep. So now, almost everything that I had on my computer is gone, but it's okay.

I also decided I'd better close the account that I had authorized them to take money from. It took some doing at the bank to leave enough money in the account for the checks which remained to be paid, transfer the remainder to a new account, and get the debit card to work for the new account. But we managed to do it. Remarkably, although I authorized payment to the scammers on a Thursday, by Monday, when I went to the bank, they hadn't taken it. So, although it cost me the time and nuisance of reinstalling the OS and changing bank accounts, it didn't end up costing me any money.