Royal Scams

It's great news that the William and Kate have had a royal baby boy!

However, as with most high profile news stories, you need to be very cautious of scammers and fraudsters using the good news as a means for distributing malware and committing fraud.  

Remember if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is! 

If someone's sending you a link to a picture or something else then you need to keep a few things in mind:

1. Just because a link or email has come from a trusted friend, doesn't mean to say that its a safe email. Their account might have been hacked. 

2. If it's legitimate and nothing bad or malicious then it should be available elsewhere on the net - places like the BBC website keep up to date with all the news and gossip - try looking there 

3. Always be careful opening attachments. 

Who Has Visited My Facebook Page?

It's a constant re-occurring question as to finding out who has visited your Facebook page.

The only system that can keep track of this information is the Facebook page itself - plugins and apps are not able to perform this type of tracking and so if you find a third party system that claims to provide a LinkedIn style list, it should be considered to be bogus.  The intention could either be to get as many visitors (page hits) as possible or to do something nasty, such as gain control of your account. 

ISP Phone SCAM

It's a crime!

The dodgy folk are now trying a new variation on the previously mentioned Microsoft Scam.  

They've obviously realised that word has got round that nobody is trusting the "I'm speaking from Windows" speech and now they've replaced it with "I am from Technical support at your Internet Service Provider", they say something along the lines of "we have noticed on our servers that each time you switch your computer on, you are not getting full internet speed and this is because of a virus on your machine. " 

Where Does It Go?

So you're enjoying spending some time on Twitter and catching up on the latest trending topic when someone you've never heard of before sends you a shortened link - Do you click it?

Telephone Scam - Not Microsoft or Windows

If someone phones you up and says that they're from Microsoft or "Windows" and that there's a problem with your computer being infected by a virus,  just say "no thanks" and hang up.

Its not Microsoft or anything to do with Windows - they never phone people up at home out of the blue like this.

It's a scam!  

Some of the aims of the scam are:

• Gain access to your computer to install viruses and other bad programs to monitor everything you do
• Obtain banking information - credit card information
• Charge you a lot of money for supposidly fixing this problem that doesn't exist