I'm being scammed and I don't know what to do.

[Not Heidi]

I rec'd an email from a Sue Chez* which begins:

"Greetings,
"I trust this email reaches you in good health. I'm pleased to report that the trade we talked about has been successfully concluded. The essential information can be found in the attached PDF."

I've never talked to anyone about any trade. With trepidation I opened the PDF. It is an invoice ostensibly from Norton Antivirus, stating that by auto debit I am paying $899.99 for subscription renewal.

I've never subscribed to Norton. I called the number on the PDF and got a guy whose first language is not English. First he argued with me, trying to convince me that I did indeed renew my subscription. Once I shut him up about that by insisting several times that I never subscribed to Norton (and I was growing increasingly rude, I confess), he said to go to this site: getmefixed.tech. I googled "getmefixed.tech scam" and this opened scam-detector.com -- which promptly froze.**

I asked the guy his name; it's "Mick Brown." I told him I'd have to call back when my computer stopped freezing (my computer is fine). He gave me his direct line -- and I hope someone else answers.

Friends, please help. What the hell do I do?

* I googled "Sue Chez" and found there are about two dozen businesses called "Chez Sue." What a coincidence, eh?

** This is what it froze on:
"www.scam-detector.com
"Connection is secure
"Proceeding..."

[Tetrachloride]

1. go visit your bank

[unweird]

4. Indeed, talk to your bank

Scammer telling you that you will be debited is the pretense for having you work with the scammer. Screw them, talk to your bank and tell the scammer to pound sand.

[EarlG]

2. My advice: Stop communicating with them immediately

Delete the email. Don't call them back under any circumstances. You don't owe Norton any money and won't be charged -- that's the scam, they're lying about that to try and get your personal info. Just cut them off and that will be the end of it.

That said,since you opened the PDF and visited a couple of scammy sites I would recommend scanning your PC for viruses, but after that, you should be fine.

[canetoad]

3. If the email and PDF

Are the only communications, and your bank account has not been touched - don't worry.

Never interact with these types of spammers. If you do, it confirms that a live human has received their message and they may be prompted to carry on spamming.

Just bin everything. Change your banking passwords if you are worried. With a bit of luck there were no nasty surprises in the PDF but it's not impossible for it to be carrying a payload.

Scan you computer with anti-malware to be on the safe side and in future just delete scammers demands and don't worry.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. Do nothing. Examine everything minutely.

You did the right thing posting here looking for help and advice.

It was a mistake to call the number. Make and accept no calls dealing with this. Answer no emails, but do read them. Don't encourage them in any way, not even to tell them to f-off.

Make sure your mail program blocks "Remote Content" because that is how scammers know who opened an email. For example the images in an email will all have tags embedded in their URLs which they can decode and each email has different tags on the images according to the address it was sent to.

Basically, they will try a bit to escalate with scare tactics. Watch it all, document it all, keep a chronology. When dealing with scams and potential scams, move slowly and think very carefully.

Feel free to post again with developments if you want advice.

[brush]

6. Have you contacted your bank's fraud department?

I assume that's how/where they would try to draw down those fund's. I'd do that immediately as they can get to the bottom of the scam.

[RockRaven]

7. Do not contact or engage with anyone under circumstances like this.

They lie to people about the existence of charges or bills or accounts just to get them to make contact, at which point they can weasel out useful identity theft information.

Delete that email and pdf, forget that phone number, never talk to them again.

[Timewas]

8. Never

Never even open those mails, just delete them,and never ever open any attachments with them they can contain malware ,never get into any conversation with any of these scammers.. Whenever you interact with them it just gives them more chance to scam you... If you just delete the mail they can't even be sure you received it and can't be sure it is a valid mail address..

[Ferrets are Cool]

13. Thank you

[SWBTATTReg]

9. Ignore this scam message. I recid the same thing several times already. And you'll notice that they never do take any

money out, how could they, they never had your acct numbers, etc. I've ignored, and nothing else ever happens, other than perhaps another like email comes in again, repeating the same scam.

Addition: And by the way, as another poster on this thread said, don't call them or interact w/ them at ALL! They're trying to get an account number or something from you to withdraw $ from you for a non-existent service.

And, if i were you, I simply would not ever click on their emails AND since you opened the PDF they sent you, you might have downloaded a virus or such when you opened their PDF. I would crash your computer immediately, and then it'll get rid of any potential viruses that were uploaded into your machine when you opened the PDF. That is, do a "Alt Cntl Delete" 3 key combination at the same time to reboot your computer or simply just unplug / unpower your computer (if you have your computer connected solely to a power strip, turn it off and then back on a few seconds later). Your machine will reboot itself automatically.

Good luck.

[usonian]

10. There are daily scams from companies I never did business with.

Some even have an old password or two that I abandoned after sites (Yahoo, LinkedIn, DocuSign) were hacked.

I just ignore them, or if they misrepresent a company, I forward the email to that company’s abuse line, usually abuse@company_name or phishing@company_name.

Try not to even open such emails from unknowns, and certainly don’t click on links in them, download anything and NEVER open an attachment from one. Needless to say, don’t call them.

One of the scams is to put a javascript endless loop in a web page, so your computer LOOKS frozen.

Learn how to hard-kill your browser (I guess it’s control-alt-delete or killall … whatever), and lose that tab.

The Norton scam is quote common. So are fake Amazon Prime alerts, many fake bank alerts, PayPal, and even USPS.

[Shermann]

11. Be a ghost until it's time not be be a ghost nt

[Nictuku]

12. Here is a Video that might shed some light

The 'Norton' scam is well-known to people who follow 'scam-baiters' - people who go after scammers.

Here is a video that might shed some light on what it is all about. I absolutely love this guy 'Pierogi' on his channel 'Scammer Payback' on Youtube, and I follow him regularly. This video is a little bit older, but I was trying to find one that focused on the Norton angle of the scam. I hope this helps. (the advice given to you by people on this thread is spot on. Ignore any attempts at communicating with you by these people.)

[FloridaBlues]

14. I keep getting the same email. Scam.

I called the company and told them about it, since I never had norton. They confirmed scam.
Report it anyway

[Not Heidi]

15. THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR ADVICE

Sorry; I haven't time to reply individually.

I called the fraud department at my bank to give them the heads up. They said as long as the scammers don't have my account info or personal information, I'll be fine.

I will not engage with them anymore. I kick myself for opening the pdf and calling the SOBs. ("But what did I know?" isn't any good; I feel stupid.)

I'm now taking my laptop to youbreakifix - not only do I want them to check for viruses and whatever else I could've downloaded; I want them to see whatever else may be wrong with it. (It freezes a lot. I am not savvy; I think I've proven that.)

Again - thank you!

[Bernardo de La Paz]

18. Don't kick yourself. You don't deserve a kick. You're safe & you learned something

We wagged our fingers at you, and that is all the punishment you need accept, especially from yourself.

Never kick yourself for coming out unscathed and more experienced.

If you want to experience an emotion, experience the feeling of "Phew, glad that didn't go south!" Then feel "Glad I'm stronger now than I was before."

[EarlG]

19. What Bernardo said above!

This is a learning experience, and its given you a new superpower -- the next time you get a weird random invoice for some service that you don't recall using, you'll be able to ignore it with confidence.

I get a lot of spam and I've probably received hundreds of these over the years. In the very beginning it was disconcerting -- *did* I have a subscription to Norton that was about to cost me hundreds of dollars? But that doubt is how they get you -- that's the scam. You were just trying to do your due diligence by making sure that you weren't going to mistakenly be charged for something -- they were relying on you to do that, so they could steal your bank details. Fortunately, you asked here first, and so they failed.

It can definitely feel uncomfortable when you first get fake invoices, but once you ignore a few of these and then a few days or weeks go by, and you realize that no money is actually coming out of your account, and you're not being charged for anything, and the invoice was a lie, it becomes way easier to ignore the rest.

99.99999999% of the time these emails are scams. But if you ever are genuinely unsure whether you've received a real mistaken invoice or not, set the email aside and find the company's information some other way. DO NOT click any links in the email, or call any numbers in the email. Instead find another way to contact the company directly -- Google their info, or go directly to their website -- and then find their contact info. That way you can be sure you're talking to the real company, and then you can inquire about the email.

So don't feel bad -- you now have some VERY useful new information which will help you combat the scammers in future!

[LPBBEAR]

16. Ignore it and

delete the email.

As a rule this kind of thing is almost always a scam.(99.999999999% always)

Don't call them.
Don't open ANY attachments
Don't let them access your computer.
Don't visit any websites listed in the email.

Just delete the email and move on.

[TwilightZone]

17. As others have noted, it's a fake and can be ignored.

Since you already visited the site, it probably downloaded malware on to your PC.

I read the post that said you intend to take the computer in to have it scanned, etc. If you'd like to try to take care of it yourself first, download and install the free version of Malwarebytes at the link below and let it get rid of anything it finds.

https://www.malwarebytes.com/