New Scam

[DIGGER]

This is new........happened last Saturday........now understand that I know very little about computer scams, computer fraud, and the internal workings of computers so I'm just a messenger with a warning.

My son and daughterinlaw are very computer literate.    My daughter in law and her 4 yr old son were in the room with the computer when suddenly the web cam on the computer flased and instantly child porn pictures started appearing on the screen along with the picture of my daughterinlaw and my grandson.   It said to send $300 to get their picture off the porn site.    She freaked out and called the police and the fraud division sent 2 officers to their residence and checked it out.    They took info and all and said they would ck into it.   They also said the newest scam is the bad guys now can drive by your house and throw a device into your yard that records all key strokes of your wifi , thus they can retrieve your passwords.      man, it's getting crazy out there.   

[musclehead]

the last one I delt with, I logged onto THIS site and a page popped up with a little applet window showing me, cause it launched my web cam (lap top) with the emblem of homeland security, the FBI and one other saying I had 24 hours to pay a $300 "fine" or they would come and drag me off to jail.

the charges were kiddie porn and a couple others I can't think of.

I took care of it by hard boot and starting in safe mode and deleting the crap.

they haven't dragged me off to jail, so I'm thinking it was hackers

[Longlivedixie]

The VERY first thing that should be done to a laptop is put a piece of electrical tape over the webcam. I leaned that the hard way when I bought a new Samsung laptop in 11' that had a virus/malware from the factory that had a key-logger, and took a snapshot every thirty seconds on the webcam.

At that time, there were allegations made on the net and at technical websites that such a thing was going on, but Samsung managed to sluff it off.......but it was TRUE. I have it documented 7 ways to Sunday. First thing I done was burn a mirror disk as soon as I fired it up. Then I took a couple hours of home video while I sifted through the OS and found the virus. All documented.

[Gryphon]

Ransom Ware               I've heard from several people lately that have had to deal with this.  Musclehead has the right idea on how to deal with it.

[JimmyG]

A good way to stop it is to catch them and cut their thumbs off...