[eggie smurf]

Has anyone gotten an email from one of their contacts that they are stranded in the UK and lost their credit cards and passport and need a loan sent Western Union?

This must be the newest scam email going around - I have gotten the same email from two different contacts that had no idea these were going out. I have looked on the internet but cannot find anything. It seems as if somehow, they get your address book and send this email to everyone in it which is a bit scary!! Just wanted to let everyone here know in case they haven't received it yet or if anyone knows what it is, and how to prevent it from happening on your computer.

[Gerda]

Are these coming from people you have in your email acount? If so you may want to run a spyware program as you may be infected, when I had the facebook nonsense going on I found a great program called malewarebytes You can download it here
http://www.malwarebytes.org/ It is free and it picks up anything your antivirus don't. AND beleive me my antivirus does not pick up things

thanks for the head up on the new scam,

[Arnhem Smurfs]

A month ago there was an article in a dutch paper telling about the rise of spyware programs...
The most of this spyware is spread around by.....anti-spyware programs!!!!

The biggest infections of pc's infected with these pc was the us, with the netherlands as runner-up....

According to the guy who researched this he claimed that you should NEVER buy a online spyware removal program, or even worse use a free one or trial one online.
The legitimate anti virus programs have also problems guarding your pc from it, simply becuase most of these programs are WILLINGLY installed by the users, but of course not for willingly introducing spyware, but for trying out a bew program...the program being a anti-spyware program...

So a good firewall to block out hackers or invasions from outside, and the NON-installing of any trial softwarer unless you really know the source is good and save...helps the best to prevent problems...

Me myself I hardly ever have problems with these kind of things, and I use no virusscanner installed on my pc. Once in a while i use (online) Trend Micro Housecall, I have my windows firewall on and that is it.

But for instance in facebook: I block all these "nice" gadgets i get send by my friends: pictures, quites, a message, a "I like this" and that is it, because these gadgets are 3rd party things, and therefor dangerous.

For me incoming mail is a bit easier to select into suspicious or not, since 95% of my real incoming mals is in dutch, so any english mail is suspicious...if not comming from one of you guys...

so for instance today i had a mail suggesting I should follow the link to recheck my paypal account settings...but is a so called paypal hyper link not a bit odd if it has pizza421 . com or so in it....

Ron

[eggie smurf]

Are these coming from people you have in your email acount?

These are people I have in my account but they have me in theirs too. I think it only happens to users that use online address books (ie. Hotmail, AOL, etc) because those are the addresses it comes from. I do not have any of my contacts online with my email server so I think that is safe. At work we have a physical firewall as well as windows firewall and antivirus so are extremely secure here. The only way we would get a virus is if someone opens it in email and clicks a link which we all know NOT to do. My mother won't even open any forwards anymore because years ago she got a virus that way

[SmurfingH]

Thanks for the heads up Staci. Not had any like that yet though. And thanks for the link Gerda!