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On 07/02/12 11:44, Neil Winchurst wrote: > Yesterday a friend told me his tale of woe. He has ordered something > from Amazon. Fine, so do many of us. Then he received an email, > supposedly from DHL, referring to his order, asking him to click on an > attachment. You guessed it, he did just that and his hard disk was > trashed. Luckily he does have a backup on an external drive which was > not plugged in at the time. But meanwhile he has had to leave his > computer with a local computer expert who is trying to sort it all out. > > So, some thoughts on this. Yes, I know, it is easy to be wise after the > event. > > I do not know if DHL do courier work for Amazon, but even so, they are > unlikely to email someone directly. Anyway, how would they know the > email address? > > How did the scammer know about the order anyway? And how did he know my > friend's email address? > > There are some very sad people around. > > Yes, my friend does use Windows, though I do not know which version. If > he had been running Linux would the scam program still have run > successfully? I ask this because I could perhaps talk to him about > moving to Linux to avoid such problems, if it would indeed be safer, > once his computer is sorted. > > Any comments anyone...? > > Neil > > Either way Having a dual boot system can sometimes be handy for such cases as you can't access something boot in to Linux, even a live session and access the windows hard disk, mount another hard disk and copy data across, To answer the question regarding if it would have worked under Linux which browser / mail client is he using, would it do the same under firefox / thunderbird for example if not perhaps start by switching to those. A lesson learnt. Paul -- -- http://www.zleap.net http://www.ubuntu.com skype : psutton111 -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq