All they are trying to do is get you to send your OWN money to them, they’re not interested in refunding you anything. Instead they transfer money between your accounts to look like they posted a refund, but, oops, they paid too much and they need you to wire the funds back to them. In another version of this scam the scammer will request your online banking log in information to post a refund to you. You obviously don’t want to give a scammer your credit card information. If the scammer senses that you are especially gullible, he might ask you for your credit card information in order to “process the refund”. But in the background, he’ll be installing other malicious software and more unattended remote access tools – so that he can get into your computer anytime, even when you’re not on the phone with him. When the scammer has you on the phone, he will tell you that they need to remote in to your computer in order to uninstall the software and process your refund. When you make that phone call, you will be talking to a professional scammer who is very good and very clever at this game. That’s the big mistake here – calling the phone number. And of course the person doesn’t want to pay that charge, so they call the number. Or it might even say, “To cancel this renewal charge, call this number”. They know that people will read this and think, “Wait a minute, I don’t subscribe to those antivirus programs – what’s going on?” And the person will see that big notice that says “For information about your order, please call…”. The REAL goal of these scam emails is to get you to call the phone number. Of course, the recipients of these emails are not going to be charged anything. They are supposedly being sent from Norton or McAfee, and the basic message is that your credit card will be charged $199, $299, or even $399 (the dollar amount varies) to renew the service that you have supposedly subscribed to. They tend to follow a predictable format.

Scammers have been sending out a LOT of them – sometimes over 200,000 in a single day. There’s a good chance you’ve gotten an email at some point over the past several months. We’ve seen a rash of these scams lately and want to get the word out to our members to help protect you from becoming the victim of fraud.

Norton antivirus emails