This really pissed me off. I just found out the other day my Mom was scammed out of $1,100 from one of those Computer Virus scams. It's when you go to a site and a pop up appears and says your PC is infected. And it does not let you navigate out very easy...even sometimes you need to restart your PC.
My Mom is 82 years old and she is pretty savvy on a computer. She has been on the Internet for almost 15 years. But even someone like her can get duped by a slick conman.
What happens is that this pop-up appears and it makes it appear you have a virus and you can not exit the screen. The pop up says to call this phone number. From there the salesman lays their pitch extracting money from countless victims.
Of course their main targets are the elderly. As they are the most vulnerable. In the case of my Mom where were able to put a stop payment on the check. I am guessing they do not take credit cards as they know it will be charged back and/or they do not have the ability to get a merchant account.
One thing I recommend we all do is to educate our parents or tech newbies in our family about these types of scams and to never let anyone have access to your PC and to never give money to any tech support person. Always contact a family member "in the know" first.
One thing we can do which I did not know is that we can report these cases to the FTC and they will go after these fraudsters. It is a $26 million dollar a year business and that is only from the 96,000 complaints filed. Image all the people who do not file a complaint.
Anyhow you can report these instances to: Report Fraud Here
They have already put three guys behind bars. Let's get them ALL.