Porn bill. Can't get rid of.

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One of my housemates has a problem.

He told me he clicked on a porn site, took a quick tour, found the quality disappointing, decided he wasn't gonna waste his cash on such rubbish and left.

So now they've sent him a bill for nearly a hundred quid. The bill sits on the desktop, obsuring half the screen, rendering his PC practically useless.

As the resident IT expert, I'm supposed to resolve this issue, except I haven't got a clue.

Any ideas ?

 

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Yeah.....Right! Honest!

 

Nah, it wasn't me. My PC is still working.

 

I believe u mate...what I would ask is...did he actually pay for anything? and how is it they sent him this bill? What details did he give is he able to contact them and say he never purchased anything as such and get the money refunded?

Otherwise he's pretty much stuffed and will have to pay the bill regardless...(of course on a more dodgy note hehe, he should have used a proxy app to hide his IP address from such atrocities ) but we wont condone that now will we?

 

Nah he didn't pay for anything. How is it they sent him the bill is a bit of a mystery to be honest. I thinking they planted a cookie somewhere that we can't get hold of, because we deleted the program repeatedly, but it keeps on loading up back again.

 

sounds like spyware to me
i like drastic action for spyware, just because its annoying enough for people to think before they click
format & rebuild

 

I don't see how anything can be 'sent' to a desktop in this fashion.

Sounds like the most likely thing is that he picked up a piece of malware from the site which is now displaying a bill which is probably designed to embarass the user into contacting the site and either paying, or giving them his contact details for some other scam.

Have you tried running avery anti-virus/spyware/ etc thing you can get your hands on?

 

Forget about it. My man ain't gonna pay his porn bill, he ain't gonna pay his anti-virus/spyware/ etc either. His Norton security software expired almost 2 years ago.

I'm advising him to recover the PC and be done with it. This would definitely fix the problem, no ?

 

...probably won't work (lol), but what if you were to reatore it to a restore point previous to when he visited the site?

 

Thanx. You think that would definitely work ?

 

Malware.

Format & Reinstall.

The amount of time it will take you to clean the PC will outweigh the effort involved in flattening it.

This should serve as a salutary lesson to your click-happy friend.

Restoring to a previous point in time won't make any difference - system restore is a useless function when you've been rinsed with spyware/malware. Fantastic when you purposefully installed software and want to back out - not so much use when the software was installed without you knowing, as such scumware inevitably hides itself in all sorts of insidious places.

Time to bite the bullet and give him the bad news

 

You can't help some people...
Wait for your AV to expire then go and look for some porn.

There's some good free stuff out there:

http://wiki.castlecops.com/

I use this a lot, I think it was SG who mentioned it on a thread last year.

 

Well, if he hasn't installed any software or made any changes (that he desperately needs) since he visited the site, then there's no harm in trying...

 

Okay, we'll give that a shot. Big thanx.

 

Just read this entry here by my man, Zeb. Looks like the restore option ain't the way to go.

 

Good point.

 

And then bill the porn site for the repair and installation costs brought about by their snide under hand tactics!

 

Heh.

And if they don't pay, we'll sue them for mental trauma.

 

i say format - reinstall.

im assuming "your friend" is on dial-up?