Are you kidding me!?

So, I was watching a video on YouTube about couponing when suddenly this picture came up on my screen. It and sign that claims to be from the F.B.I. I freaked out at first, wondering what on earth I did. It accused me of a.) Using or distributing copyrighted material, b.) Accessing porn, child pornography, or zooaphila, and c.) Allowing someone else to do the above things either from my computer or a remote site still using my computer.

When I read that I was like, really? I'm watching YouTube, if anyone is to blame it is YouTube! But then I read on and saw that it was asking for money. My particular scam picture showed retailers that I could purchase a MoneyPak from. First of all, the government doesn't care about what kind of money you give them, so I knew that it was a scam because of the MoneyPak thing, second of all it mentioned specific retailers which I would think would be against the law because maybe not everyone has access to these retailers.

Anyway, I wasn't able to exit out of it no matter what I did. I ended up getting on the iPad and looking up FBI scam. Tons of sites popped up with solutions for fixing it. I basically had to restart my computer in safe mode and manually go through my files and locate and delete the virus. It was scary because I could have deleted something essential to my computer. However, I didn't and I successfully managed to get rid of the virus.

I felt so accomplished, but also scared. How many people actually paid this fine in fear? Why do people have to scam others and steal their hard-earned money.

Even if you hadn't been doing the first two, the third allegation makes it seem like even if a virus or scam took over your computer and forced you to access these sites, then you were still responsible! How terrible!

The worse thing is, many of these scammers don't live within U.S. jurisdiction so they can continue scamming people and get away with it!

I've learned about some virus protection software that should help in the future.

Lexy