Scams And How To Avoid Them

Hello and thank you for clicking on my post, read on and I will enlighten you on how to avoid most scams which might include; keyloggers, social engineering, trojans and worms, though this does not exclude the possibility of other types of scams designed to acquire your account information.
Take it as life experience, given to you in one neat, streamlined package for your reading pleasure.

This post is for those people who might be in doubt as whether or not something is a scam/fraud, and more importantly, this post is for anyone who downloaded a program from an unofficial page linked by a member posting in this forum.

"Disclaimer" I am lazy, there might be some spelling mistakes, some information I did not think of, or excluded, because I found it being redundant. Please refrain from wasteful flames because you just want to say something.
On the other hand, I like good discussions, so please feel free to post questions, additions to what I write, or constructive criticism.

Post begins:

I have known about the existence of this forum for approximately 24 hours now. I created a forum account for the sole reason to post this message and possibly hang around to find useful things.
What caught my eye was the amount of apparent scams floating around as well as people asking for "Maple Story", cheats/hacks that do not work with the newer versions of the server. Trust me in this. At this moment, there is no working Maple Story cheats downloadable on this board. I have been through it, up and down and sideways. They do not work. If someone says they do, they are trying to scam you. (Incidentally, I have never tried playing Maple Story, but I started looking because so many were interested, and also most of the scams I saw were for Maple Story.)

Now for a rant about scams, please read this post: (read what I write)
Forum Thread, read this.

If you followed the link and read, what I posted you should have a good basic understanding of what to do and what not to do. What to trust and what to doubt.

What I am trying to say is, "when in doubt, don't".
Do not trust somebody just because they say it is true, or because they are nice. That is basic social engineering. Be paranoid and only trust someone if they have something to loose.
If MPC put infected applications in the download section, they would loose their reputation and they might possibly be sued, (though probably not. Depends on their disclaimer and whether or not they did it knowingly, bla bla bla. OK, I will stop talking about law, which I know very little about and stick to the subject: Scamming, which I know a lot about).

If you do not want to become a paranoid, distrustful, control freak like me then seek help, and the name of this help is software. The type of software you need is: Spy ware removal, antivirus and firewall. If you want to be a little safer, then get a debugger and a hex editor.

This is what you do:
If you get a program from anyone (which you in the first case should have deleted, or even better; have refrained from downloading at all), do what I do. Not everything can be caught this way, but it works for most things.
1. Get a software firewall, (I recommend Sygate Personal Firewall Pro), and if anything you do not recognize tries to connect to the internet, disallow it. Of course, this only happens if you ran the program and it was infected.)
2. Get some antivirus, (I recommend Symantec Antivirus), and a rather big amount of key loggers, trojans and worms can be rooted out in this manner. Just scan before you run.
3. Get a Hex Editor and/or a debugger, (I recommend SoftIce (debugging), and Hex Workshop (Hex Editor), use both to open the file (I said OPEN, NOT RUN), take a peek at it. If it sends any instructions to an email address or homepage, then it is possibly a keylogger/trojan/worm/etc. (unless of course it is an application with auto update or meant to send instructions to an online game server directly and not through the game client of an online game).
4. Get a Spy ware remover, (I recommend "Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Professional", or "Spybot - Search & Destroy". SpyBot is freeware and rather good, but Ad-Aware still catches more. Run the scan regularly to keep your computer clean.


Any questions, feel free to ask. If you want to flame me, you had best make sure your spelling and grammar is impeccable, I am having a good day, you have a sense of humour and that “ridiculed”, is part of your vocabulary.


Whatever the case may be, I hope you learned something, in which case, reading this entire post was not a complete waste of time.
Have a great day, and if you need any info, then feel free to PM me questions.