You are a victim of an online scam in which the attacker installed a trojan that locked my computer, and offered me a virus removal program to fix my computer for $50. You accepted, and the attacker charged your account $6000 for 6 Surf boards. What laws were violated? What actions did you commit that you should not have committed? How can you remedy and prevent this from occurring again?1
The attacker can be charged with the following Violations:
No Electronic Theft Act (18 U.S.C. § 506).
Identity Theft & Assumption Deterrence Act (18 U.S.C. § 1028).
Fraud and Related Activity in Connection with Computers (18 U.S.C. § 1030).
Interception and Disclosure of Wire, Oral, or Electronic Communications (18 U.S.C. § 2511).
Unlawful Access to Stored Communications (18 U.S.C. § 2701)
Disclosure of Contents (18 U.S.C. § 2702)
Actions I committed that I should not have:
1. Clicked on a pop up link;
2. Gave my account information to fix my computer; and
3. Let a foreign program run on my computer.
How to remedy and prevent the issue from occurring again:
1. File an unauthorized dispute with the credit card company since the amount is greater than $50;
2. File a complaint with the FTC;
3. Set up automatic spending alerts and fraud protection on all my accounts
4. Shop only from repudiable online stores;
5. Make online purchases using Visa gift-cards;
6. Scan programs with antivirus software before running them;
7. Use virus protection to remove the trojan; and
8. In similar scams that lock the browser, simply kill the task by running $ pkill browerName, or if on Windows, end task on the porogram through taks
